Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France

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The work, herewith republished, represents Marx’s first attempt to explain a segment of contemporary history by means of his materialist conception upon the basis of the prevailing economic condition. In the Communist Manifesto, this theory had been applied in rough outline to the entire modern history, and in Marx’s and my own articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung it had constantly been used for the interpretation of current political events. Here, however, it became a matter of tracing the inherent causal connection of a development extending over several years which was for the whole of Europe as critical as it was typical, that is, bringing back, in the sense of the author, upon political events the effects of what, in the last analysis, were economic causes.

In an attempt to judge events and series of events taken from current history, one will never be able to go back to the very last economic causes. Even in these days, when the professional press furnishes material so copiously, it will be impossible even in England to trace the course of industry and commerce in the world’s market, or to follow the changes in production methods day after day in such manner as to be able to draw at any given moment a general conclusion from these highly complicated and ever changing factors, factors of which the most important often work for a long time under cover before they suddenly and forcibly come to the surface. A clear survey of the economic history of a given period can never be gained at the time; it is possible only later, after the subsequent collection and assortment of the material. Here statistics are an indispensable aid, but they always limp behind the event. When dealing with current contemporary history one will often be forced to treat this, the most decisive factor, as constant and to consider the economic situation found at the beginning of a given period as governing the entire period without variation, or to consider only such changes of the situation as emanate from events plainly visible and therefore also quite manifest. The materialist method must here too often confine itself to a tracing back of political conflicts to the conflicts of interests among the social classes and class factions of a given economic development, and to prove that the different political parties are the more or less adequate political expression of these same classes and class factions.

It goes without saying that the inevitable neglect of the simultaneous changes of the economic situation, the real basis of all the events to be investigated, is bound to be a source of error. But all the conditions of a comprehensive presentation of the history of the day inevitably include sources of error-which deters no one from writing current history.

At the time Marx undertook this work, the said source of error was even far more inevitable. To trace during the revolutionary period, 1848-49, the simultaneous economic transformations, or to maintain a survey of them, was plainly impossible. Precisely so during the first months of the London exile, in the autumn and winter of 1849-50. That was just the time when Marx began this work. But despite these unpropitious circumstances, his thorough knowledge of the economic condition of France, as well as of the political history of that country since the February revolution, enabled him to give a presentation of events, which uncovered their inner connection in a manner not since attained, and which later met, brilliantly, the double test that Marx himself subjected them to.

The first test was occasioned by Marx, since the spring of 1850, again gaining some leisure for economic studies and, as a beginning, taking up the economic history of the last ten years. From the facts themselves it became thoroughly clear to him what, thus far, and from the fractional material at hand, he had half deduced a priori: that the world commercial crisis of 1847 was the real cause of the February and March revolutions, and that the industrial prosperity which arrived gradually in the middle of 1848, coming to full bloom in 1849 and 1850 was the vitalizing factor of the renascent European reaction. This was decisive. While the first three articles (published in the January-March issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, “Politico-economic Review,” Hamburg, 1850) the expectation of an early renewed upward turn of revolutionary energy is still looked for, the historic review, written by Marx and myself, and published in the final double number – May-October-which appeared in the autumn of 1850, breaks once for all with these illusions: “A new revolution is possible only as the consequence of a new crisis. And it is also as certain as the latter.” But that was really the only essential change that had to be made. As to the interpretation of events, given in former parts, as well as the causal connections therein set forth, absolutely nothing had to be changed, as is shown by the continuation of the review covering the period from March 10 down to the autumn of 1850. This continuation I have included as the fourth article in the present edition.

The second test was still harder. Immediately after Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851, Marx worked anew upon the history of France from February, 1848, down to the aforesaid event which, for the time being, terminated the revolutionary period. (“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Third Edition, Meissner, Hamburg, 1885.) In this brochure is treated once more, though more briefly, the period dealt with in our joint review. Compare this second presentation, written in the light of a decisive event that occurred more than a year later, with ours, and it will be found that the author had to change but very little.

What gives to our review a decidedly special significance is the circumstance that, for the first time, it expressed the formula which today, with general unanimity of the labor parties of all the countries of the world, briefly summarizes their demand for economic reconstruction: the expropriation of the means of production by society. In the second chapter, anent the “Right to Work,” which is designated as the “first awkward formula wherein the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are condensed,” it is said: “But behind the Right to Work stands the power over capital, behind the power over capital stands the expropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, therefore, the abolition of wage labor and of capital and of their mutual relations.” Hence, here is formulated-for the first time-the thesis whereby modern working class Socialism is sharply differentiated, not only from all the different shades of feudal, bourgeois, petty bourgeois, etc., Socialism, but also from the confused notions of a community of goods of the Utopian as well as the original labor communism.

If, later, Marx extended the formula to the expropriation of the means of exchange, this extension, which became a matter of course after the Communist Manifesto, simply expressed a corollary of the main thesis. Some wise people in England have recently added that the “means of distribution” should also be assigned to society. It would be difficult for these gentlemen to explain what are these means of distribution as distinct from the means of production and exchange – unless political means of distribution are meant, taxes, doles to the poor, including the Sachsenwald (communal forest) and other endowments. But these, in the first place, are means of distribution already in the possession of society, the State or the Municipality; and, second, it is we who would abolish them.

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At the time the February revolution began, in so far as our conception of the conditions and the course of revolutionary movements are concerned, we were all subject to the prevailing historic experience, notably that of France. It was just the latter that had dominated the entire European history since 1789, and from whom now again had come the signal for a general transformation. And thus, inevitably and as a matter of course, were our conceptions of the nature and course of the “social” revolution proclaimed in Paris in February, 1848, the revolution of the proletariat, strongly colored by the memory of the prototypes of 1789 and 1830. And, finally, when the Paris uprising found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when all Europe was drawn into the movement, all the way to the Russian border; when in June the first great battle for dominance was fought in Paris between proletariat and bourgeoisie; when even the victory of its class so shattered the bourgeoisie that it fled back into the arms of the same monarchist-feudal reaction that had just been overthrown, there could be, under the conditions prevailing, no doubt for us that the great decisive struggle was at hand, that it would have to be fought to a finish in one long revolutionary period and with shifting fortunes, but that it could end only in the final victory of the proletariat.

By no means did we, after the defeats of 1849, share the illusions of vulgar democracy, grouped in partibus about the provisional future governments. These reckoned with an imminent, once for all decisive victory of the “people” over its “oppressors”; we reckoned with a long struggle, after the elimination of the “oppressors,” among the antagonistic elements concealed among that very “people.” Vulgar democracy expected a renewed outbreak from one day to another; we, already in the autumn of 1850, declared that the first phase of the revolutionary period had closed and that nothing could be looked forward to until the advent of a new economic world crisis. Wherefore we were banned with bell, book and candle as traitors to the revolution by the same people who, later on, almost without exception made their peace with Bismarck – in so far as Bismarck considered them worth while.

But history also proved us in the wrong, and revealed our opinion of that day as an illusion. History went even farther; not only did it destroy our former error, but also it transformed completely the conditions wider which the proletariat will have to battle. The fighting methods of 1848 are today obsolete in every respect, and that is a point which right here deserves closer investigation.

Hitherto, all revolutions implied the elimination of one form of class rule by another; hitherto, all ruling classes formed but small minorities as compared with the ruled popular mass. Whenever one minority was overthrown, another minority instead took hold of the reins of power and remodeled the State institutions according to its interests. In every instance it was that minority group which, according to the degree of economic development, was capable and therefore called upon to rule, on that account and principally, because it always happened that the ruled majority either aided the revolution on the side of the ruling minority, or at least passively tolerated the same. But, leaving aside the concrete contents in each case, the common form of all these revolutions was that they were minority revolutions. Even when the majority cooperated, it was done-consciously or not-only in the service of a minority; and the latter obtained thereby, or even through the passive, unresisting attitude of the majority, the appearance of being the representative of all the people.

After the first great success, the minority as a rule split; one half was content with what had been gained, while the other half, wanting to go further, set up new demands which in part were really or apparently in the interest of the great mass of the people. The more radical demands would in some isolated cases be enforced, but more often only for the moment; the more moderate party would again get the upper hand and that which had been won last was again lost in whole or in part; the vanquished would then shout treason or would attribute the defeat to accident. In reality the lay of the land was usually this: the gains of the first victory were made secure only through the second victory of the radical party; whenever that, and thereby momentary needs had been attained, the radicals and their successes would vanish from the scene.

All the more modern revolutions, beginning with the great English revolution of the 17th century, exhibited these features which seem inseparable from every revolutionary struggle. They appear applicable also to the struggles of the proletariat for its emancipation, applicable the more so since, just in 1848, those could be counted who even in a measure understood in which direction emancipation was to be looked for. The proletarian masses themselves, even after their Paris victory, were absolutely at sea as to the course to be pursued. And yet, there was the movement-instinctive, spontaneous, irrepressible. Was not that just the situation wherein the revolution must succeed, led by a minority, it is true, but this time not in the interest of that minority but in the most specific interest of the majority? If in all the longer revolutionary periods the great popular masses were so easily won over by the merely plausible lures of the forward-pushing minorities, why should they be less accessible to ideas that were the very reflex of their economic condition, nothing but the clear, logical expression of their needs not yet understood and only vaguely sensed by them? True, this revolutionary disposition of the masses had most always, and often very soon, made way for lassitude or even a reversal into its opposite as soon as the illusion had been dispelled and disenchantment had come. But here was not a case of lures but one of the attainment of the very interests of the great majority itself, interests then by no means clear to that majority, but which soon had to become clear through convincing demonstrations in the course of their realization. And if then, as shown in the third article of Marx, in the spring of 1850 developments had concentrated the real ruling power in the bourgeois republic that had emanated from the “social” revolution of 1848 in the hands of the big bourgeoisie, which, on top of all, entertained monarchistic desires, while all other social classes, peasants as well as petty bourgeoisie, had been grouped about the proletariat in such manner that in case and after a common victory not the bourgeoisie but the proletariat made wary by experience would become the decisive factor-in such case were not the chances favorable for a reversion of the revolution of the minority into the revolution of the majority?

History has proved us wrong and all others who thought similarly. It has made clear that the status of economic development on the Continent was then by no means ripe for the abolition of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has affected the entire Continent and has introduced large industry in France, Austria, Hungary. Poland, and, more recently, in Russia, and has made of Germany an industrial country of the first rank-all this upon a capitalist basis which, reckoning from 1848, implies great expansive capacity. But it was just this industrial revolution that has everywhere introduced clarity in regard to class relations, which has eliminated a mass of hybrid forms taken over from the period of manufacture and, in Eastern Europe, even from guild handicraft, which has produced a real bourgeoisie and a real industrial proletariat and forced both into the foreground of social evolution. Thereby has the struggle between these two great classes, which in 1848 existed outside of England only in Paris and, perchance, in a few large industrial centers, been spread over the whole of Europe, and has attained an intensity unthinkable in 1848. We had then the many vague sectarian evangels with their panaceas; we have today the one universally accepted, transparently clear theory of Marx, sharply formulating the final purposes of the struggle. We had then the masses, divided and differentiated according to locality and nationality, undeveloped, held together only by a sense of common suffering, aimlessly driven hither and thither between enthusiasm and despair; we have today the one great international army of Socialists, advancing irresistibly, daily growing in numbers, organization, discipline, discernment and certainty of victory. And if this powerful army of the proletariat has not yet reached the goal, if, far from winning the victory by one fell blow, it must gradually proceed by hard, tenacious struggle from position to position, it proved once for all how impossible it was in 1848 to bring about the social transformation by a sheer coup de main.

Given a bourgeoisie split in two dynastic-monarchist sections, but which above all things demanded tranquility and security for its financial transactions, and opposed to it a defeated but still threatening proletariat about which petty bourgeois and peasant elements more and more grouped themselves-a permanent threat of violent outbreaks which, however, offered no prospect for the solution-that was the situation almost made to order for the coup d’état of the third, the pseudo-democratic pretender, Louis Bonaparte. By means of the army he made, on December 2, 1851, an end of the tense situation and secured internal quiet to Europe, only to bestow upon her a new era of war. The period of revolutions from below had come to a close for the time being; there followed a period of revolutions from above.

The imperialist reaction of 1851 gave to us new proof of the unripeness of the proletarian aspirations of the time. But the reaction itself was to create the conditions under which they had to ripen. Internal tranquility secured full development of the new industrial prosperity, the necessity to provide work for the army and to divert the revolutionary currents into outward channels produced the wars, wherein Bonaparte, wider the pretext of upholding the “principle of nationality,” sought to gather in annexations for France. His imitator, Bismarck, adopted the same policy for Prussia: he made his coup d’état, his revolution from above, in 1866, against the German Bund and Austria, and no less against the Prussian “conflict-chamber.” But Europe was too small for two Bonapartes, and so the irony of history willed it that Bismarck overthrew Bonaparte, and that King William of Prussia not only restored the limited German empire but also the French republic. The general result was, however, that in Europe the independence and internal unity of the great nations, with the exception of Poland, had become a fact. It had done so, of course, within relatively modest limits – but at any rate so much so that the working class process of development no longer was hampered by nationalist complications. The gravediggers of the revolution of 1848 had become the executors of its last will and testament. And, beside them, already rose threatening the heir of 1848, the proletariat in its Internationale.

After the war of 1870-71, Bonaparte disappears from the stage and Bismarck’s mission is finished, so that he can subside again to his status of an ordinary Junker. The termination of this period is formed by the Paris Commune. A surreptitious attempt by Thiers to abstract from the Paris National Guard its cannon, caused a victorious uprising. It was again shown that, in Paris, no revolution is possible other than a proletarian one. Government fell, after the victory, into the lap of the working class, all by itself. And again it was shown how impossible even then, twenty years after the period depicted in our review, was the rule of the working class. On the one hand, France left Paris in the lurch, looked on while it was bled to death under the bullets of MacMahon; on the other hand, the Commune consumed itself in a futile struggle between the two parties that split it, the Blanquists (the majority), and the Proudhonists (the minority), neither of whom knew what was to be done. As sterile as the coup de main of 1848 was the gift-victory of 1871.

With the Paris Commune, the militant proletariat was considered finally buried. But, on the contrary, from the Commune and the Franco-German war may be dated its most powerful rise. By the complete transformation of the methods of warfare, through the conscription of the entire population capable of bearing arms into armies that could thereafter be counted only by the millions, through firearms, projectiles and explosives of hitherto unheard-of effectiveness, a sudden end was made, on the one hand, of the Bonapartist period of wars, and subsequent peaceful industrial development was made secure because any war was made impossible other than a world war of unheard-of horrors and of absolutely incalculable outcome. On the other hand, this military transformation caused the cost of maintaining these armies to rise in geometric progression, drove taxation to unattainable heights and thereby the poorer classes of the people into the arms of Socialism. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the most immediate cause of the mad competition in armaments, might produce a chauvinist cleavage between the French and the German bourgeoisie; but for the workers of both countries it formed a new bond of union. The anniversary of the Paris Commune became the first common festive day for the entire proletariat.

The war of 1870-71 and the defeat of the Commune had, as predicated by Marx, shifted the center of gravity of the European labor movement, for the time being, from France to Germany. In France, of course, years were required to recover from the bloodletting of May, 1871. In Germany, however, where industry fertilized by the French milliard indemnity was developed with hot-house rapidity, the Social Democracy grew still more rapidly and effectively. Thanks to the discernment with which the workers utilized the general franchise, introduced in 1866, the astonishing growth of the party lies in incontestable figures open before all the world. 1871: 102,000; 1874: 352,000; 1877: 493,000 Social Democratic votes. Then came the high governmental acknowledgment of this progress in the shape of the anti-Socialist law. For the moment, the party was dispersed, the vote sank to 312,000 in 1881. But that was soon overcome, and now, under pressure of the exceptional law, without a press, without a legal organization, without the right of assembly, began the most rapid growth in spite of all. 1884: 550,000; 1887: 763,000; 1890: 1,427,000 votes. Then the hand of the State was lamed. The anti-Socialist law vanished, the Socialist vote rose to 1,787,000, more than a quarter of the entire vote cast. The Government and the ruling classes had exhausted all their means-uselessly, purposelessly, unsuccessfully. The most palpable proofs of their own impotence which the authorities, from night watchman to chancellor, had been made to swallow-and from the despised workers, at that-these proofs could be counted by the million. The State had got to the end of its resources, the workers were but at the beginning of theirs.

The German workers had, moreover, rendered to their cause a second great service, besides the first of their mere existence as the strongest, the best disciplined and the most rapidly growing Socialist party; they had furnished their comrades in all countries with a new and one of the sharpest weapons, by showing them how to utilize the general franchise.

The general franchise had for a long time existed in France, but had there fallen into bad repute through the misuse it had been put to by the Bonapartist Government. After the Commune, there was no labor party in existence to use it. In Spain, too, it had existed since the republic, but in Spain abstention from voting on the part of all serious opposition parties had ever been the rule. Even the Swiss experience with the general franchise had been anything but encouraging to a labor party. The revolutionary workers of the Latin countries had got into the habit of looking upon the franchise as a pitfall, as an instrument for governmental chicane. In Germany it was otherwise. The Communist Manifesto had already proclaimed the struggle for the general franchise, for democracy, as one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat, and Lasalle had again taken up this point. And when Bismarck was forced to introduce the franchise as the sole means to interest the masses of the people in his plans, our workers immediately took it up in earnest and sent August Bebel to the first constituent Reichstag. From that day on they have utilized the franchise in a manner that has repaid them a thousandfold and has served the workers of all countries as an example. They have used the franchise and, in the words of the French Marxian program, transformé, de moyen de duperie qu’il a ete jusqu’ici, en instrument d’émancipation, i. e., have changed it from a means of duping into an instrument of emancipation. Even if the general franchise had offered no other advantage than to permit us to count our numbers once every three years;-that through the regularly demonstrated, unexpectedly rapid growth of the vote, it increased the certainty of victory on the part of the workers in the same measure that it increased the panic of the foe, and thereby became our best means of propaganda; that it informed us, accurately, of our own strength as well as of that of all opposing parties, and gave us thereby a gauge for proportioning our action such as cannot be duplicated, restrained us from untimely hesitation as well as from untimely daring-if that were the sole gain derived from the general franchise, it would be more than enough. But it has done much more. During the election agitation, it furnished us a means, such as there is no other, of getting in touch with the masses of the people that are still far removed from us, of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions against our attacks before all the people; and, in addition, it made accessible to our representatives in the Reichstag a tribune from which they could speak to our opponents in Parliament, as well as to the masses without, with much greater authority and freedom than could be done in the press and at meetings. Of what use was the anti-Socialist law to the Government and to the bourgeoisie if the election agitation and the Socialist speeches in the Reichstag constantly broke through it?

With this successful utilization of the general franchise, an entirely new method of the proletarian struggle had come into being and had quickly been built up. It was found that the State institutions, wherein the rule of the bourgeoisie is organized, did furnish further opportunities by means of which the working class can oppose these same institutions. We participated in the elections to the Diets in the Federal States, Municipal Councillors, Industrial Courts; in short, we contested with the bourgeoisie every post in the filling of which a sufficiently large part of the proletariat had a say. And so it came about that bourgeoisie and Government feared far more the legal than the illegal action of the workers’ party, more the successes of the elections than those of rebellion.

For here too the conditions of the struggle have essentially been altered. The rebellion of the old style, the street fight behind barricades, which up to 1848 gave the final decision, has become antiquated.

Let there be no illusions about this: a real victory over the military in a street battle, a victory as between two armies, belongs to the greatest rarities. But the insurgents had seldom planned it that way. For them it had been a matter of disintegrating the troops through moral influences which, in the case of a fight between the armies of two warring countries, either did not come into play at all or, if so, in only minor degree. In case this succeeds, then the troops fail their commanders, these lose their heads and the insurrection wins. But if this does not succeed, then, even in case of numerical inferiority on the part of the military, the advantage of better equipment and training, the unity of command, the well-planned application of the forces at hand, discipline-all that comes into play. The utmost the insurrection can accomplish in a tactical action is the proper erection and defense of a single barricade. Mutual support, the disposition and the use of reserves, in short, that which is needed for the mere defense of a section of a city, to say nothing of the whole of it, the indispensable cooperation and dovetailing of the separate commands can be attained in but small measure, often not at all. The concentration of battle forces upon one decisive point is thereby made impossible. Thus, passive resistance becomes the prevailing form of the struggle. The offensive will here and there rise to occasional attacks and flanking movements, but the rule will be to confine itself to the occupation of positions abandoned by retreating troops. Added to thist there is on the side of the military the control of large ordnance and of fully equipped and thoroughly trained engineering troops, means of combat which the insurgents lack in most every case. No wonder that barricade fights conducted with the greatest heroism-Paris, June, 1848; Vienna, October, 1848; Dresden, May, 1849-ended with the defeat of the insurrection, as soon as the attacking leaders, unhampered by political considerations, proceeded from purely military points of view and their soldiers remained dependable.

The numerous successes of the insurgents of 1848 are due to many reasons. In Paris, July, 1830, and February, 1848, as well as in most Spanish street battles, there stood between the insurgents and the military a citizens’ guard, which either went directly over to the side of the uprising, or through a lukewarm indecisive attitude caused the troops to waver and, on top of that, furnished arms to the insurrection. Wherever this citizens’ guard at the very outset took a stand against the insurrection, as in Paris, June, 1848, the latter was quelled. In Berlin, 1848, the people won, partly because of the accretion of considerable new forces during the night and the morning of the 19th of March, partly because of the exhaustion and the poor provisioning of the troops, and, finally, because of the lamed command. In every instance, the victory was won because the troops failed, because the commanders lacked decision, or because their hands were tied.

Therefore, even during the classic period of street battles, the barricade had a moral rather than a material effect. It was a means to shake the solidity of the military. If it held until that had been accomplished, the victory was won; if not, it meant defeat.

Already in 1849 the chances of success were rather poor. Everywhere had the bourgeoisie gone over to the side of the governments, “culture and possessions” greeted and feted the military marching out against the insurrections. The barricade had lost its charm; the soldier saw behind it no longer “the people,” but rebels, agitators, plunderers, dividers, the dregs of society; the officer had in the course of time become familiar with the tactical forms of the street battle; no longer did he march in direct line and without cover upon the improvised breastworks, but outflanked them through gardens, courts and houses; and that succeeded now with some skill in nine cases out of ten.

Since then, much more has been changed, all in favor of the military. If the cities have become larger, so have the armies. Paris and Berlin, since 1848, have quadrupled, but their garrisons have grown more than that. These garrisons, by means of the railroads, may be doubled inside of twenty-four hours, and in forty-eight hours may swell to gigantic armies. The armament of these enormously augmented troops has become incomparably more effective. In 1848 the smoothbore, muzzle-loaded percussion rifle, today the small-caliber, magazine breech loader, shooting four times as far, ten times as accurately and ten times as quickly as the former. At that time the solid projectiles and case shot of the artillery with relatively weak effect, today the percussion shell, one of which suffices to shatter the best barricade. Then the pickaxe of the pioneer to break through the fire walls, today the dynamite cartridge.

On the side of the insurgents, however, all the conditions have become worse. An uprising wherewith all layers of the population sympathize will hardly come again; in the class struggle the middle layers will hardly ever group themselves around the proletariat so fully that the party of reaction, gathering around the bourgeoisie, will be almost eclipsed by comparison. The “people” will for that reason always appear divided, and thus a powerful lever, so effective in 1848, will be missing. Even if on the side of the insurrection there be more trained soldiers, it will become more difficult to arm them. The hunting and sporting rifles of the warehouses-even if the police has not rendered them useless by the removal of a part of the mechanism-are no match for the magazine rifle of the soldier even at close quarters. Up to 1848 one could make his own ammunition out of powder and lead, today the cartridge for each rifle model varies, being similar only in that all of them are the product of large industry and not to be extemporized, which renders most rifles useless unless one has the special ammunition made for them. And, finally, the newly-built quarters of the large cities, erected since 1848, have been laid out in long, straight and wide streets as though made to order for the effective use of the new cannon and rifles. The revolutionary, who would himself select the new working class districts in the north and east of Berlin for a barricade battle, would have to be a lunatic.

Does the reader now understand why the ruling classes, by hook or by crook, would get us where the rifle pops and the sabre slashes? Why, today, do they charge us with cowardice because we will not, without further ado, get down into the street where we are sure of our defeat in advance? Why are we so persistently importuned to play the role of cannon fodder?

The gentlemen are wasting their importunities as well as their provocations all in vain. We are not quite so silly. They might as well ask of their enemies in the next war to face them in the line formation of Frederick II, or in the columns of whole divisions a la Wagram and Waterloo, and with the old flint-and-pan gun in hand, at that. The time is past for revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake and why they are to act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But so that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required, and it is this work that we are now performing with results that drive our enemies to despair.

In the Latin countries, too, it is being realized that the old tactics must be revised. Everywhere, the German example of the utilization of the franchise and of the conquest of all possible positions has been imitated. In France, where the soil has been raked up for more than a hundred years by revolution after revolution, where not a single party exists that has not done its part in conspiracies, insurrections and in all other revolutionary actions; in France, where because thereof the army is by no means certain for the government, and where, generally speaking, the conditions for an insurrectionary coup de main are much more favorable than in Germany-even in France the Socialists realize more and more that no durable success is possible unless they win over in advance the great mass of the people, which, in this case, means the peasants. The slow work of propaganda and parliamentary activity are here also recognized as the next task of the party. Success did not fail to come. Not only has a whole series of Municipal Councils been conquered, but in the Chamber there are fifty Socialists, and these have already overthrown three Ministries and one President of the Republic. In Belgium, the workers have last year conquered the franchise, and have won in one quarter of the election districts. In Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, aye, even in Bulgaria and Rumania, the Socialists are represented in the respective Parliaments. In Austria all parties are agreed that access to the Reichsrat can no longer be denied us. That we shall gain access is certain, and the only question at issue is through which door. Even in Russia, when the celebrated Zemskij Sobor is assembled-the National Assembly against which the young Nicholas has so vainly balked-even there we may reckon with certainty that we shall be represented.

Of course, our comrades abroad have not abandoned the right to revolution. The right to revolution is, in the last analysis, the only real “historic right” upon which all modern States rest without exception, including even Mecklenburg where the revolution of the nobility was terminated in 1755 through the “inheritance agreement,” the glorious confirmation of feudalism valid this very day. The right to revolution is so thoroughly recognized in the inner consciousness of man, that even General von Boguslawski deduces from this popular right alone the coup d’état whereby to vindicate his Kaiser.

However, happen what may in other countries, the German Social Democracy holds a specific position and, for that reason and for the time being, faces a specific task. The 2,000,000 voters whom it sends to the hustings, plus the young men and women non-voters standing behind them, these form the most numerous, the most compact “shock troops” of the international proletarian army. This mass already furnishes more than 25 per cent of the total vote cast; and, as shown by the special election for the Reichstag, the Diet elections in the several States, the Municipal Council and the Industrial Court elections, it is growing apace uninterruptedly. Its growth is so spontaneous, so steady, so irresistible and yet at the same time as quiet as that of a natural process. All governmental interference with it has proved futile. Today, we may figure with 2,225,000 voters. If this goes on, we shall at the close of the century win over the greater part of the middle social layers, petty bourgeoisie as well as small peasants, and we shall come to be the decisive power in the land, before which all other powers must bow whether they like it or not. To keep going this growth without interruption until it swamps the ruling governmental system, that is our main task. And there is but one means whereby the steadily swelling growth of the militant Socialist forces in Germany could for the moment be stemmed, or could even for a time be thrown back: a collision on a large scale with the military, a bloodletting like that of 1871 in Paris. In the long run, that too would be overcome. To shoot out of existence a party numbering millions, that is not possible with all the magazine rifles in Europe and America. But normal development would be hindered, the decision delayed, prolonged and coupled with heavy sacrifices.

The irony of history turns everything upside down. We, the “revolutionists,” the “upsetters,” we thrive much better with legal than with illegal means in forcing an overthrow. The parties of order, as they call themselves, perish because of the legal conditions set up by themselves. With Odilon Barrot they cry out in despair: la legalité nous tue-legality is our death-while we with this same legality acquire swelling muscles and red cheeks and look the picture of health. And if we are not insane enough to favor them by letting them drive us into street battles, nothing will in the end be left to them but themselves to break through the legality that is so fatal to them.

Meantime, they are grinding out new laws against the revolution. Again, everything has been set up head down. The fanatics of anti-revolution of today, are not they themselves the revolutionists of yesterday? Did we perchance bring about the civil war in 1866? Did we depose and drive away from their ancestral legitimate realms the King of Hanover, the Elector of Hesse, the Duke of Nassau and annex their patrimonial dominions? And these destroyers of the German Bund and of three crowns bestowed by the Grace of God complain about revolution?! Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes? – Who could permit the worshippers of Bismarck to revile the revolution?

Let them force through their anti-revolutionary legislation, make it even worse and transform the entire penal code into caoutchouc, they will accomplish naught but a new demonstration of their impotence. Seriously to assail the Social Democracy, they will have to have recourse to entirely different measures. The Social-Democratic revolution, which is getting on first rate while abiding by the law, they can only get at by means of a revolution made by the law and order party, which cannot live without breaking the law. Herr Rossler, the Prussian bureaucrat, and Herr von Boguslawski, the Prussian general, have shown them the only way to get at the workers, who refuse to be lured into a street battle,-violation of the constitution, dictatorship, back to absolutism, regis voluntas, suprema lex! Take heart, gentlemen, here no pursing of the lips will do, here you must whistle!

But do not forget that the German Reich, like all smaller German States, and, indeed, like all modern States, is the product of a covenant; first, of a covenant among the rulers themselves, and, second, of a covenant of the ruler with the people. If one party breaks the agreement, the whole of it falls, the other party being no longer bound by it.

Now almost 1,600 years ago, there was at work in the Roman empire a dangerous revolutionary party. It undermined religion and all the foundations of the State; it denied point blank that the emperor’s will was the highest law, it was without a fatherland, international, it spread out over the entire realm from Gaul to Asia, and even beyond the borders of the empire. It had long worked underground and in secrecy, but had, for some time, felt strong enough to come out openly in the light of day. This revolutionary party, known under the name of Christians, also had strong representation in the army; entire legions were composed of Christians. When they were commanded to attend the sacrificial ceremonies of the Pagan established church, there to serve as a guard of honor, the revolutionary soldiers went so far in their insolence as to fasten special symbols-crosses-on their helmets. The customary disciplinary barrack measures of their officers proved fruitless. The emperor, Diocletian, could no longer quietly look on and see how order, obedience and discipline were undermined in his army. He acted energetically while there was yet time. He promulgated an anti-Socialist-beg pardon-an anti-Christian law. The meetings of the revolutionaries were prohibited, their meeting places were closed or even demolished, the Christian symbols, crosses, etc., were forbidden as in Saxony they forbid red pocket handkerchiefs. The Christians were declared unfit to hold office in the State, they could not even become corporals. Inasmuch as they did not at that time have judges well drilled as to the “reputation of a person,” such as Herr Roller’s anti-Socialist law presupposes, the Christians were simply forbidden to seek their rights in a court of law. But this exceptional law, too, remained ineffective. In defiance, the Christians tore it from the walls, yea, it is said that at Nikomedia they fired the emperor’s palace over his head. Then the latter revenged himself by means of a great persecution of Christians in the year 303 A. D. This was the last persecution of its kind. It was so effective that, seventeen years later, the army was composed largely of Christians, and that the next autocratic ruler of the entire Roman empire, Constantine, called “the Great” by the clericals, proclaimed Christianity as the religion of the State.

London, March 6, 1895.

The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Part I

The Defeat of June, 1848

After the July Revolution [of
1830], when the liberal banker Laffitte led his compère, the Duke
of Orléans, in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville, he let fall the words:
“From now on the bankers will rule”. Laffitte had betrayed
the secret of the revolution.

It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one
faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of
coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated
with them – the so-called financial aristocracy. It sat on the
throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed public offices, from
cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts.

The industrial bourgeoisie proper formed part of the official
opposition, that is, it was represented only as a minority in the Chambers. Its
opposition was expressed all the more resolutely the more unalloyed the
autocracy of the finance aristocracy became, and the more it imagined that its
domination over the working class was insured after the revolts of 1832, 1834,
and 1839, which had been drowned in blood.[64] Grandin, a Rouen manufacturer and
the most fanatical instrument of bourgeois reaction in the Constituent as well
as in the Legislative National Assembly, was the most violent opponent of
Guizot in the Chamber of Deputies. Léon Faucher, later known for his
impotent efforts to climb into prominence as the Guizot of the French
counterrevolution, in the last days of Louis Philippe waged a war of the pen
for industry against speculation and its train bearer, the government.
Bastiat agitated in the name of Bordeaux and the whole of
wine-producing France against the ruling system.

The petty bourgeoisie of all gradations, and the peasantry
also, were completely excluded from political power. Finally, in the official
opposition or entirely outside the pays légal [electorate], there were
the ideological representatives and spokesmen of the above classes,
their savants, lawyers, doctors, etc., in a word, their so-called men of
talent.

Owing to its financial straits, the July Monarchy was dependent from the
beginning on the big bourgeoisie, and its dependence on the big bourgeoisie was
the inexhaustible source of increasing financial straits. It was impossible to
subordinate the administration of the state to the interests of national
production without balancing the budget, without establishing a balance between
state expenditures and revenues. And how was this balance to be established
without limiting state expenditures – that is, without encroaching on
interests which were so many props of the ruling system – and without
redistributing taxes – that is, without shifting a considerable share of
the burden of taxation onto the shoulders of the big bourgeoisie itself?

On the contrary, the faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated
through the Chambers had a direct interest in the indebtedness of
the state. The state deficit was really the main object of its
speculation and the chief source of its enrichment. At the end of each year a
new deficit. After the lapse of four or five years a new loan. And every new
loan offered new opportunities to the finance aristocracy for defrauding the
state, which was kept artificially on the verge of bankruptcy – it had to
negotiate with the bankers under the most unfavorable conditions. Each new loan
gave a further opportunity, that of plundering the public which invested its
capital in state bonds by means of stock-exchange manipulations, the secrets of
which the government and the majority in the Chambers were privy to. In
general, the instability of state credit and the possession of state secrets
gave the bankers and their associates in the Chambers and on the throne the
possibility of evoking sudden, extraordinary fluctuations in the quotations of
government securities, the result of which was always bound to be the ruin of a
mass of smaller capitalists and the fabulously rapid enrichment of the big
gamblers. As the state deficit was in the direct interest of the ruling faction
of the bourgeoisie, it is clear why the extraordinary state expenditure in the
last years of Louis Philippe's reign was far more than double the
extraordinary state expenditure under Napoleon, indeed reached a
yearly sum of nearly 400,000,000 francs, whereas the whole average annual
export of France seldom attained a volume amounting to 750,000,000 francs. The
enormous sums which in this way flowed through the hands of the state
facilitated, moreover, swindling contracts for deliveries, bribery,
defalcations, and all kinds of roguery.

The defrauding of the state, practiced wholesale in connection with loans,
was repeated retail in public works. What occurred in the relations between
Chamber and government became multiplied in the relations between individual
departments and individual entrepreneurs.

The ruling class exploited the building of railways in the same way
it exploited state expenditures in general and state loans. The Chambers piled
the main burdens on the state, and secured the golden fruits to the speculating
finance aristocracy. One recalls the scandals in the Chamber of Deputies when
by chance it leaked out that all the members of the majority, including a
number of ministers, had been interested as shareholders in the very railway
constructions which as legislators they had carried out afterward at the cost
of the state.

On the other hand, the smallest financial reform was wrecked through the
influence of the bankers. For example, the postal reform. Rothschild
protested. Was it permissible for the state to curtail sources of revenue out
of which interest was to be paid on its ever increasing debt?

The July Monarchy was nothing other than a joint stock company for the
exploitation of France's national wealth, whose dividends were divided among
ministers, Chambers, 240,000 voters, and their adherents. Louis Philippe was
the director of this company – Robert Macaire[65] on the throne. Trade, industry,
agriculture, shipping, the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, were bound
to be continually endangered and prejudiced under this system. Cheap
government, governement à bon marché, was what it had inscribed on its
banner in the July days.

Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the
administration of the state, had command of all the organized public
authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and
through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same
mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the court to the Café
Borgne[2] to get rich not by
production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others, Clashing
every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of
unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of
bourgeois society – lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally
seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle.
The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its
pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the
heights of bourgeois society.

And the nonruling factions of the French bourgeoisie cried:
Corruption! The people cried: À bas les grands voleurs! À bas les
assassins! [Down with the big thieves! Down with the
assassins!] when in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois
society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the
lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the
bar of justice, to the dungeon, and to the scaffold. The industrial bourgeoisie
saw its interests endangered, the petty bourgeoisie was filled with moral
indignation, the imagination of the people was offended, Paris was flooded with
pamphlets – “The Rothschild Dynasty,” “Usurers Kings of
the Epoch,” etc. – in which the rule of the finance aristocracy was
denounced and stigmatized with greater or less wit.

Rien pour la gloire! [Nothing for
glory!] Glory brings no profit! La paix partout et toujours!
[Peace everywhere and always!] War depresses the
quotations of the 3 and 4 percents which the France of the Bourse jobbers had
inscribed on her banner. Her foreign policy was therefore lost in a series of
mortifications to French national sentiment, which reacted all the more
vigorously when the rape of Poland was brought to its conclusion with the
incorporation of Cracow by Austria, and when Guizot came out actively on the
side of the Holy Alliance in the Swiss separatist war.[66] The victory of the Swiss liberals in this
mimic war raised the self-respect of the bourgeois opposition in France; the
bloody uprising of the people in Palermo worked like an electric shock on the
paralyzed masses of the people and awoke their great revolutionary memories and
passions. [Annexation of Cracow by Austria in agreement
with Russia and Prussia on November 11, 1846. – Swiss Sonderbund war:
November 4 to 28, 1847. – Rising in Palermo: January 12, 1848; at the end
of January, nine days’ bombardment of the town by the Neapolitans. Note
by Engels to the edition of 1895.]

The eruption of the general discontent was finally accelerated and the mood
for revolt ripened by two economic world events.

The potato blight and the crop failures of 1845 and 1846
increased the general ferment among the people. The famine of 1847 called forth
bloody conflicts in France as well as on the rest of the Continent. As against
the shameless orgies of the finance aristocracy, the struggle of the people for
the prime necessities of life! At Buzançais, hunger rioters executed[67]; in Paris, oversatiated
escrocs [swindlers] snatched from the courts by the royal family!

The second great economic event that hastened the outbreak of the revolution
was a general commercial and industrial crisis in England. Already
heralded in the autumn of 1845 by the wholesale reverses of the speculators in
railway shares, staved off during 1846 by a number of incidents such as the
impending abolition of the Corn Laws, the crisis finally burst in the autumn of
1847 with the bankruptcy of the London wholesale grocers, on the heels of which
followed the insolvencies of the land banks and the closing of the factories in
the English industrial districts. The after-effect of this crisis on the
Continent had not yet spent itself when the February Revolution broke out.

The devastation of trade and industry caused by the economic epidemic made
the autocracy of the finance aristocracy still more unbearable. Throughout the
whole of France the bourgeois opposition agitated at banquets for an
electoral reform which should win for it the majority in the Chambers
and overthrow the Ministry of the Bourse. In Paris the industrial crisis had,
moreover, the particular result of throwing a multitude of manufacturers and
big traders, who under the existing circumstances could no longer do any
business in the foreign market, onto the home market. They set up large
establishments, the competition of which ruined the small épiciers [grocers] and boutiquiers [shopkeepers] en masse. Hence the innumerable
bankruptcies among this section of the Paris bourgeoisie, and hence their
revolutionary action in February. It is well known how Guizot and the Chambers
answered the reform proposals with an unambiguous challenge, how Louis Philippe
too late resolved on a ministry led by Barrot, how things went as far as
hand-to-hand fighting between the people and the army, how the army was
disarmed by the passive conduct of the National Guard, how the July Monarchy
had to give way to a provisional government.

The Provisional Government which emerged from the February
barricades necessarily mirrored in its composition the different parties which
shared in the victory. It could not be anything but a compromise between
the different classes which together had overturned the July throne, but
whose interests were mutually antagonistic. The great majority of its
members consisted of representatives of the bourgeoisie. The republican petty
bourgeoisie was represented by Ledru-Rollin and Flocon, the republican
bourgeoisie by the people from the National[3], the dynastic opposition by Crémieux, Dupont de
l'Eure, etc.[68] The
working class had only two representatives, Louis Blanc and Albert. Finally,
Lamartine in the Provisional Government; this was at first no real interest, no
definite class; this was the February Revolution itself, the common uprising
with its illusions, its poetry, its visionary content, and its phrases. For the
rest, the spokesman of the February Revolution, by his position and his views,
belonged to the bourgeoisie.

If Paris, as a result of political centralization, rules France, the
workers, in moments of revolutionary earthquakes, rule Paris. The first act in
the life of the Provisional Government was an attempt to escape from this
overpowering influence by an appeal from intoxicated Paris to sober France.
Lamartine disputed the right of the barricade fighters to proclaim a republic
on the ground that only the majority of Frenchmen had that right; they must
await their votes, the Paris proletariat must not besmirch its victory by a
usurpation. [From Lamartine's speech of 24
February] The bourgeoisie allows the proletariat only one
usurpation – that of fighting.

Up to noon of February 25 the republic had not yet been proclaimed; on the
other hand, all the ministries had already been divided among the bourgeois
elements of the Provisional Government and among the generals, bankers, and
lawyers of the National. But the workers were determined this time not to put
up with any bamboozlement like that of July, 1830. They were ready to take up
the fight anew and to get a republic by force of arms. With this message,
Raspail betook himself to the Hôtel de Ville. In the name of
the Paris proletariat he commanded the Provisional Government to
proclaim a republic; if this order of the people were not fulfilled within two
hours, he would return at the head of 200,000 men. The bodies of the fallen
were scarcely cold, the barricades were not yet disarmed, and the only force
that could be opposed to them was the National Guard. Under these circumstances
the doubts born of considerations of state policy and the juristic scruples of
conscience entertained by the Provisional Government suddenly vanished. The
time limit of two hours had not yet expired when all the walls of Paris were
resplendent with the gigantic historical words:

République français! Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Even the memory of the limited alms and motives which drove the bourgeoisie
into the February Revolution was extinguished by the proclamation of the
republic on the basis of universal suffrage. Instead of only a few factions of
the bourgeoisie, all classes of French society were suddenly hurled into the
orbit of political power, forced to leave the boxes, the stalls, and the
gallery and to act in person upon the revolutionary stage! With the
constitutional monarchy vanished also the semblance of a state power
independently confronting bourgeois society, as well as the whole series of
subordinate struggles which this semblance of power called forth!

By dictating the republic to the Provisional Government, and through the
Provisional Government to the whole of France, the proletariat immediately
stepped into the foreground as an independent party, but at the same time
challenged the whole of bourgeois France to enter the lists against it. What it
won was the terrain for the fight for its revolutionary emancipation, but by no
means this emancipation itself.

The first thing the February Republic had to do was, rather, to complete
the rule of the bourgeoisie by allowing, besides the finance aristocracy,
all the propertied classes to enter the orbit of political power. The
majority of the great landowners, the Legitimists, were emancipated from the
political nullity to which they had been condemned by the July Monarchy. Not
for nothing had the Gazette de France agitated in common with the
opposition papers; not for nothing had La Roche-Jaquelein taken the side of the
revolution in the session of the Chamber of Deputies on February 24. The
nominal proprietors, the peasants, who form the great majority of the
French people, were put by universal suffrage in the position of arbiters of
the fate of France. The February Republic finally brought the rule of the
bourgeoisie clearly into view, since it struck off the crown behind which
capital had kept itself concealed.

Just as the workers in the July days had fought for and won the
bourgeois monarchy, so in the February days they fought for and won
the bourgeois republic. Just as the July Monarchy had to proclaim
itself a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, so the
February Republic was forced to proclaim itself a republic surrounded by
social institutions. The Paris proletariat compelled this
concession, too.

Marche, a worker, dictated the decree [decree on the
right to work, 25 February 1848] by which the newly formed Provisional
Government pledged itself to guarantee the workers a livelihood by means of
labor, to provide work for all citizens, etc. And when a few days later it
forgot its promises and seemed to have lost sight of the proletariat, a mass of
20,000 workers marched on the Hôtel de Ville with the cry: Organize
labor! Form a special Ministry of labor! Reluctantly and after long
debate, the Provisional Government nominated a permanent special commission
charged with lending means of improving the lot of the working classes! This
commission consisted of delegates from the corporations [guilds] of Paris
artisans and was presided over by Louis Blanc and Albert. The Luxembourg Palace
was assigned to it as its meeting place. In this way the representatives of the
working class were banished from the seat of the Provisional Government, the
bourgeois part of which retained the real state power and the reins of
administration exclusively in its hands; and side by side with the
ministries of finance, trade, and public works, side by side with the Bank and
the Bourse, there arose a socialist synagogue whose high priests,
Louis Blanc and Albert, had the task of discovering the promised land, of
preaching the new gospel, and of providing work for the Paris proletariat.
Unlike any profane state power, they had no budget, no executive authority at
their disposal. They were supposed to break the pillars of bourgeois society by
dashing their heads against them. While the Luxembourg sought the philosopher's
stone, in the Hôtel de Ville they minted the current coinage.

And yet the claims of the Paris proletariat, so far as they went beyond the
bourgeois republic, could win no other existence than the nebulous one of the
Luxembourg.

In common with the bourgeoisie the workers had made the February Revolution,
and alongside the bourgeoisie they sought to secure the advancement of their
interests, just as they had installed a worker in the Provisional Government
itself alongside the bourgeois majority. Organize labor! But wage labor, that
is the existing, the bourgeois organization of labor. Without it there is no
capital, no bourgeoisie, no bourgeois society. A special Ministry of Labor! But
the ministries of finance, of trade, of public works – are not these the
bourgeois ministries of labor? And alongside these a proletariat Ministry of
Labor had to be a ministry of impotence, a ministry of pious wishes, a
Luxembourg Commission. Just as the workers thought they would be able to
emancipate themselves side by side with the bourgeoisie, so they thought they
would be able to consummate a proletarian revolution within the national walls
of France, side by side with the remaining bourgeois nations. But French
relations of production are conditioned by the foreign trade of France, by her
position on the world market and the laws thereof; how was France to break them
without a European revolutionary war, which would strike back at the despot of
the world market, England?

As soon as it has risen up, a class in which the revolutionary interests of
society are concentrated finds the content and the material for its
revolutionary activity directly in its own situation: foes to be laid low,
measures dictated by the needs of the struggle to be taken; the consequences of
its own deeds drive it on. It makes no theoretical inquiries into its own task.
The French working class had not attained this level; it was still incapable of
accomplishing its own revolution.

The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general, conditioned by
the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Only under its rule does the
proletariat gain that extensive national existence which can raise its
revolution to a national one, and only thus does the proletariat itself create
the modern means of production, which become just so many means of its
revolutionary emancipation. Only bourgeois rule tears up the material roots of
feudal society and levels the ground on which alone a proletarian revolution is
possible. French industry is more developed and the French bourgeoisie more
revolutionary than that of the rest of the Continent. But was not the February
Revolution aimed directly against the finance aristocracy? This fact proved
that the industrial bourgeoisie did not rule France. The industrial bourgeoisie
can rule only where modern industry shapes all property relations to suit
itself, and industry can win this power only where it has conquered the world
market, for national bounds are inadequate for its development. But French
industry, to a great extent, maintains its command even of the national market
only through a more or less modified system of prohibitive duties. While,
therefore, the French proletariat, at the moment of a revolution, possesses in
Paris actual power and influence which spur it on to a drive beyond its means,
in the rest of France it is crowded into separate, scattered industrial
centers, almost lost in the superior number of peasants and petty bourgeois.
The struggle against capital in its developed, modern form – in its
decisive aspect, the struggle of the industrial wage worker against the
industrial bourgeois – is in France a partial phenomenon, which after the
February days could so much the less supply the national content of the
revolution, since the struggle against capital's secondary modes of
exploitation, that of the peasant against usury and mortgages or of the petty
bourgeois against the wholesale dealer, banker, and manufacturer – in a
word, against bankruptcy – was still hidden in the general uprising
against the finance aristocracy. Nothing is more understandable, then, than
that the Paris proletariat sought to secure the advancement of its own
interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie, instead of enforcing them
as the revolutionary interests of society itself, that it let the red flag be
lowered to the tricolor[70]. The French workers could not take a step
forward, could not touch a hair of the bourgeois order, until the course of the
revolution had aroused the mass of the nation, peasants and petite bourgeois,
standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, against this order,
against the rule of capital, and had forced it to attach itself to the
proletarians as its protagonists. The workers could buy this victory only
through the tremendous defeat in June.

The Luxembourg Commission, this creation of the Paris workers, must be given
the credit of having disclosed, from a Europe-wide tribune, the secret of the
revolution of the nineteenth century: the emancipation of the
proletariat. The Moniteur blushed when it had to propagate
officially the “wild ravings”[71] which up to that time had lain buried in
the apocryphal writings of the socialists and reached the ear of the
bourgeoisie only from time to time as remote, half-terrifying, half-ludicrous
legends. Europe awoke astonished from its bourgeois doze. Therefore, in the
minds of the proletarians, who confused the finance aristocracy with the
bourgeoisie in general; in the imagination of the good old republicans who
denied the very existence of classes or, at most, admitted them as a result of
the constitutional monarchy; in the hypocritical phrases of the factions of the
bourgeoisie which up to now had been excluded from power, the rule of the
bourgeoisie was abolished with the introduction of the republic. At that
time all the royalists were transformed into republicans and all the
millionaires of Paris into workers. The phrase which corresponded to this
imaginary abolition of class relations was fraternité, universal
fraternization and brotherhood. This pleasant abstraction from class
antagonisms, this sentimental reconciliation of contradictory class interests,
this visionary elevation above the class struggle, this fraternite, was the
real catchword of the February Revolution. The classes were divided by a mere
misunderstanding, and on February 24 Lamartine christened the Provisional
Government “une gouvernement qui suspends ce malentendu terrible qui
existe entre les différentes classes” [a
government that removes this terrible misunderstanding which exists between the
different classes, from Lamartine's speech, 24 February 1848]. The Paris
proletariat reveled in this magnanimous intoxication of fraternity.

The Provisional Government, for its part, once it was compelled to proclaim
the republic, did everything to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie and to
the provinces. The bloody terror of the first French republic was disavowed by
the abolition of the death penalty for political offenses; the press was opened
to all opinions – the army, the courts, the administration remained with
a few exceptions in the hands of their old dignitaries; none of the July
Monarchy's great offenders was brought to book. The bourgeois republicans of
the National amused themselves by exchanging monarchist names and costumes for
old republican ones. To them the republic was only a new ball dress for the old
bourgeois society. The young republic sought its chief merit not in
frightening, but rather in constantly taking fright itself, and in winning
existence and disarming resistance by soft compliance and nonresistance. At
home to the privileged classes, abroad to the despotic powers, it was loudly
announced that the republic was of a peaceful nature. Live and let live was its
professed motto. In addition to that, shortly after the February Revolution the
Germans, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, and Italians revolted, each people in
accordance with its immediate situation. Russia and England – the latter
itself agitated, the former cowed – were not prepared. The republic,
therefore, had no national enemy to face. Consequently there were no great
foreign complications which could fire the energies, hasten the revolutionary
process, drive the Provisional Government forward or throw it overboard. The
Paris proletariat, which looked upon the republic as its own creation,
naturally acclaimed each act of the Provisional Government which facilitated
the firm emplacement of the latter in bourgeois society. It willingly allowed
itself to be employed on police service by Caussidière in order to protect
property in Paris, just as it allowed Louis Blanc to arbitrate wage disputes
between workers and masters. It made it a point d'honneur [point of honor] to preserve the bourgeois honor of the
republic unblemished in the eyes of Europe.

The republic encountered no resistance either abroad or at home. This
disarmed it. Its task was no longer the revolutionary transformation of the
world, but consisted only in adapting itself to the relations of bourgeois
society. As to the fanaticism with which the Provisional Government undertook
this task there is no more eloquent testimony than its financial
measures.

Public credit and private credit were naturally shaken.
Public credit rests on confidence that the state will allow itself to
be exploited by the wolves of finance. But the old state had vanished and the
revolution was directed above all against the finance aristocracy. The
vibrations of the last European commercial crisis had not yet ceased.
Bankruptcy still followed bankruptcy.

Private credit was therefore paralyzed, circulation restricted,
production at a standstill before the February Revolution broke out. The
revolutionary crisis increased the commercial crisis. And if private credit
rests on confidence that bourgeois production in the entire scope of its
relations – the bourgeois order – will not be touched, will remain
inviolate, what effect must a revolution have had which questioned the basis of
bourgeois production, the economic slavery of the proletariat, which set up
against the Bourse the sphinx of the Luxembourg? The uprising of the
proletariat is the abolition of bourgeois credit, for it is the abolition of
bourgeois production and its order. Public credit and private credit are the
economic thermometer by which the intensity of a revolution can be measured.
The more they fall, the more the fervor and generative power of the
revolution rises.

The Provisional Government wanted to strip the republic of its antibourgeois
appearance. And so it had, above all, to try to peg the exchange value of this
new form of state, its quotation on the Bourse. Private credit
necessarily rose again, together with the current Bourse quotation of the
republic.

In order to allay the very suspicion that it would not or could not
honor the obligations assumed by the monarchy, in order to build up confidence
in the republic's bourgeois morality and capacity to pay, the Provisional
Government took refuge in braggadocio as undignified as it was childish. In
advance of the legal date of payment it paid out the interest on the 5-percent,
4 ½-percent and 4-percent bonds to the state creditors. The bourgeois aplomb,
the self-assurance of the capitalists, suddenly awoke when they saw the anxious
haste with which this government sought to buy their confidence.

The financial embarrassment of the Provisional Government was naturally not
lessened by a theatrical stroke which robbed it of its stock of ready cash. The
financial pinch could no longer be concealed and petty bourgeois,
domestic servants, and workers had to pay for the pleasant
surprise which had been prepared for the state creditors.

It was announced that no more money could be drawn on savings bank
books for an amount of over a hundred francs. The sums deposited in the
savings banks were confiscated and by decree transformed into an irredeemable
state debt. This embittered the already hard-pressed petty bourgeois
against the republic. Since he received state debt certificates in place of his
savings bank books, he was forced to go to the Bourse in order to sell them and
thus deliver himself directly into the hands of the Bourse jobbers against whom
he had made the February Revolution.

The finance aristocracy, which ruled under the July Monarchy, had its high
church in the Bank. Just as the Bourse governs state credit, the Bank
governs commercial credit.

Directly threatened not only in its rule but in its very existence by the
February Revolution, the Bank tried from the outset to discredit the republic
by making the lack of credit general. It suddenly stopped the credits of the
bankers, the manufacturers, and the merchants. As it did not immediately call
forth a counterrevolution, this maneuver necessarily reacted on the Bank
itself. The capitalists drew out the money they had deposited in the vaults of
the Bank. The possessors of bank notes rushed to the pay office in order to
exchange them for gold and silver.

The Provisional Government could have forced the Bank into
bankruptcy without forcible interference, in a legal manner; it would
have had only to remain passive and leave the Bank to its fate. The
bankruptcy of the Bank would have been the deluge which in an instant
would have swept from French soil the finance aristocracy, the most powerful
and dangerous enemy of the republic, the golden pedestal of the July Monarchy.
And once the Bank was bankrupt, the bourgeoisie itself would have had to regard
it as a last desperate attempt at rescue, if the government had formed a
national bank and subjected national credit to the control of the nation.

The Provisional Government, on the contrary, fixed a compulsory
quotation for the notes of the Bank. It did more. It transformed all
provincial banks into branches of the Banque de France and allowed it to cast
its net over the whole of France. Later it pledged the state forests
to the Bank as a guarantee for a loan contracted from it. In this way the
February Revolution directly strengthened and enlarged the bankocracy which it
should have overthrown.

Meanwhile the Provisional Government was writhing under the incubus of a
growing deficit. In vain it begged for patriotic sacrifices. Only the workers
threw it their alms. Recourse had to be had to a heroic measure, to the
imposition of a new tax. But who was to be taxed? The Bourse wolves,
the bank kings, the state creditors, the rentiers, the industrialists? That was
not the way to ingratiate the republic with the bourgeoisie. That would have
meant, on the one hand, to endanger state credit and commercial credit, while
on the other, attempts were made to purchase them with such great sacrifices
and humiliations. But someone had to fork over the cash. Who was sacrificed to
bourgeois credit? Jacques le bonhomme, the peasant.

The Provisional Government imposed an additional tax of 45 centimes to the
franc on the four direct taxes. The government press cajoled the Paris
proletariat into believing that this tax would fall chiefly on the big landed
proprietors, on the possessors of the milliard granted by the Restoration.[72] But in truth it hit the
peasant class above all, that is, the large majority of the French
people. They had to pay the costs of the February Revolution; in them
the counterrevolution gained its main material. The 45-centime tax was a
question of life and death for the French peasant. He made it a life and death
question for the republic. From that moment the republic meant to the
French peasant the 45 centime tax, and he saw in the Paris proletariat
the spendthrift who did himself well at his expense.

Whereas the Revolution of 1789 began by shaking the feudal burdens off the
peasants, the Revolution of 1848 announced itself to the rural population by
the imposition of a new tax, in order not to endanger capital and to keep its
state machine going.

There was only one means by which the Provisional Government could set aside
all these inconveniences and jerk the state out of its old rut – a
declaration of state bankruptcy. Everyone recalls how Ledru-Rollin in
the National Assembly subsequently described the virtuous indignation with
which he repudiated this presumptuous proposal of the Bourse Jew, Fould [from Ledru-Rollin's speech 21 April 1849], now French
Finance Minister. Fould had handed him the apple from the tree of knowledge.

By honoring the bills drawn on the state by the old bourgeois society, the
Provisional Government succumbed to the latter. It had become the hard-pressed
debtor of bourgeois society instead of confronting it as the pressing creditor
that had to collect the revolutionary debts of many years. It had to
consolidate the shaky bourgeois relationships in order to fulfill obligations
which are only to be fulfilled within these relationships. Credit became a
condition of life for it, and the concessions to the proletariat, the promises
made to it, became so many fetters which had to be struck
off. The emancipation of the workers – even as a phrase –
became an unbearable danger to the new republic, for it was a standing protest
against the restoration of credit, which rests on undisturbed and untroubled
recognition of the existing economic class relations. Therefore, it was
necessary to have done with the workers.

The February Revolution had cast the army out of Paris. The National Guard,
that is, the bourgeoisie in its different gradations, constituted the sole
power. Alone, however, it did not feel itself a match for the proletariat.
Moreover, it was forced gradually and piecemeal to open its ranks and admit
armed proletarians, albeit after the most tenacious resistance and after
setting up a hundred different obstacles. There consequently remained but one
way out: to play off part of the proletariat against the other.

For this purpose the Provisional Government formed twenty–four
battalions of Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, composed of young
men from fifteen to twenty years old.[73] They belonged for the most part to the
lumpen proletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply
differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves
and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a
definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the
degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing
their lazzaroni[74]
character – at the youthful age at which the Provisional Government
recruited them, thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and
the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest
corruption. The Provisional Government paid them 1 franc 50 centimes a day;
that is, it bought them. It gave them their own uniform; that is, it made them
outwardly distinct from the blouse-wearing workers. In part it assigned
officers from the standing army as their leaders; in part they themselves
elected young sons of the bourgeoisie whose rodomontades about death for the
fatherland and devotion to the republic captivated them.

And so the Paris proletariat was confronted with an army, drawn from its own
midst, of 24,000 young, strong, foolhardy men. it gave cheers for the Mobile
Guard on its marches through Paris. It acknowledged it to be its foremost
fighters on the barricades. It regarded it as the proletarian guard in
contradistinction to the bourgeois National Guard. Its error was pardonable.

Besides the Mobile Guard, the government decided to rally around itself an
army of industrial workers. A hundred thousand workers, thrown on the streets
by the crisis and the revolution, were enrolled by the Minister Marie in
so-called national ateliers [workshops].
Under this grandiose name was hidden nothing else than the employment of the
workers on tedious, monotonous, unproductive earthworks at a wage of 23 sous.
English workhouses[75] in the open – that is what
these national ateliers were. The Provisional Government believed that
it had formed, in them, a second proletarian army against the workers
themselves. This time the bourgeoisie was mistaken in the national
ateliers, just as the workers were mistaken in the Mobile Guard. It had
created an army for mutiny.

But one purpose was achieved.

National ateliers was the name of the people's workshops which
Louis Blanc preached in the Luxembourg Palace. Marie's ateliers [workshops], devised in direct antagonism to
the Luxembourg, offered occasion, thanks to the common label, for a comedy of
errors worthy of the Spanish servant farce. The Provisional Government itself
surreptitiously spread the report that these national ateliers were the
discovery of Louis Blanc, and this seemed the more plausible because Louis
Blanc, the prophet of the national ateliers, was a member of the Provisional
Government. And in the half-naive, half-intentional confusion of the Paris
bourgeoisie, in the artificially molded opinion of France, of Europe, these
workhouses were the first realization of socialism, which was put in the
pillory, with them.

In their appellation, though not in their content, the national
ateliers were the embodied protest of the proletariat against bourgeois
industry, bourgeois credit, and the bourgeois republic. The whole hate of the
bourgeoisie was therefore turned upon them. It had found in them,
simultaneously, the point against which it could direct the attack, as soon as
it was strong enough to break openly with the February illusions. All the
discontent, all the ill humor of the petty bourgeois too was directed
against these national ateliers, the common target. With real fury they
totted up the money the proletarian loafers swallowed up while their own
situation was becoming daily more unbearable. A state pension for sham labor,
so that's socialism! they grumbled to themselves. They sought the reason for
their misery in the national ateliers, the declamations of the Luxembourg, the
processions of the workers through Paris. And no one was more fanatic about the
alleged machinations of the communists than the petty bourgeoisie, who hovered
hopelessly on the brink of bankruptcy.

Thus in the approaching melee between bourgeoisie and proletariat, all the
advantages, all the decisive posts, all the middle strata of society were in
the hands of the bourgeoisie, at the same time as the waves of the February
Revolution rose high over the whole Continent, and each new post brought a new
bulletin of revolution, now from Italy, now from Germany, now from the remotest
parts of southeastern Europe, and maintained the general ecstasy of the people,
giving it constant testimony of a victory that it had already forfeited.

March 17 and April 16 were the first skirmishes in the big
class struggle which the bourgeois republic hid under its wing.

March 17 revealed the proletariat's ambiguous situation, which
permitted no decisive act. Its demonstration originally pursued the purpose of
pushing the Provisional Government back onto the path of revolution, of
effecting the exclusion of its bourgeois members, according to circumstances,
and of compelling the postponement of the elections for the National Assembly
and the National Guard.[76] But on March 16 the bourgeoisie represented
in the National Guard staged a hostile demonstration against the Provisional
Government. With the cry À bas Ledru-Rollin [Down
with Ledru-Rollin]! it surged to the Hôtel de Ville. And the
people were forced, on March 17, to shout: Long live Ledru-Rollin! Long live
the Provisional Government! They were forced to take sides against the
bourgeoisie in support of the bourgeois republic, which seemed to them to be in
danger. They strengthened the Provisional Government, instead of subordinating
it to themselves. March 17 went off in a melodramatic scene, and whereas the
Paris proletariat on this day once more displayed its giant body, the
bourgeoisie both inside and outside the Provisional Government was all the more
determined to smash it.

April 16 was a misunderstanding engineered by the
Provisional Government in alliance with the bourgeoisie. The workers had
gathered in great numbers in the Champ de Mars and in the Hippodrome to choose
their nominees to the general staff of the National Guard. Suddenly throughout
Paris, from one end to the other, a rumor spread as quick as lightning, to the
effect that the workers had met armed in the Champ de Mars, under the
leadership of Louis Blanc, Blanqui, Cabet, and Raspail, in order to march
thence on the Hôtel de Ville, overthrow the Provisional Government, and
proclaim a communist government. The general alarm is sounded –
Ledru-Rollin, Marrast, and Lamartine later contended for the honor of having
initiated this – and in an hour 100,000 men are under arms; the Hôtel de
Ville is occupied at all points by the National Guard; the cry Down with the
Communists! Down with Louis Blanc, with Blanqui, with Raspail, with Cabet!
thunders throughout Paris. Innumerable deputations pay homage to the
Provisional Government, all ready to save the fatherland and society. When the
workers finally appear before the Hôtel de Ville, in order to hand over
to the Provisional Government a patriotic collection they had made in the Champ
de Mars, they learn to their amazement that bourgeois Paris has defeated their
shadow in a very carefully calculated sham battle. The terrible attempt of
April 16 furnished the excuse for recalling the army to Paris –
the real purpose of the clumsily staged comedy and for the reactionary
federalist demonstrations in the provinces.

On May 4 the National Assembly[4] met the result of the direct general
elections, convened. Universal suffrage did not possess the magic power
which republicans of the old school had ascribed to it. They saw in the whole
of France, at least in the majority of Frenchmen, citoyens [citizens]
with the same interests, the same understanding, etc. This was their cult
of the people. Instead of their imaginary people, the elections
brought the real people to the light of day; that is, representatives
of the different classes into which it falls. We have seen why peasants and
petty bourgeois had to vote under the leadership of a bourgeoisie spoiling for
a fight and of big landowners frantic for restoration. But if universal
suffrage was not the miracle – working magic wand the republican worthies
had taken it for, it possessed the incomparable higher merit of unchaining the
class struggle, of letting the various middle strata of bourgeois society
rapidly get over their illusions and disappointments, of tossing all the
sections of the exploiting class at one throw to the apex of the state, and
thus tearing from them their deceptive mask, whereas the monarchy with its
property qualifications had let only certain factions of the bourgeoisie
compromise themselves, allowing the others to lie hidden behind the scenes and
surrounding them with the halo of a common opposition.

In the Constituent National Assembly, which met on May 4, the bourgeois
republicans, the republicans of the National, had the upper hand.
Even Legitimists and Orléanists at first dared to show themselves only under
the mask of bourgeois republicanism. The fight against the proletariat could be
undertaken only in the name of the republic.

The republic dates from May 4, not from February 25 – that
is, the republic recognized by the French people; it is not the republic which
the Paris proletariat thrust upon the Provisional Government, not the republic
with social institutions, not the vision that hovered before the fighters on
the barricades. The republic proclaimed by the National Assembly, the sole
legitimate republic, is a republic which is no revolutionary weapon against the
bourgeois order, but rather its political reconstitution, the political
reconsolidation of bourgeois society; in a word, a bourgeois republic.
This contention resounded from the tribune of the National Assembly, and in the
entire republican and anti-republican bourgeois press it found its echo.

And we have seen how the February Republic in reality was not and could not
be other than a bourgeois republic; how the Provisional Government,
nevertheless, was forced by the immediate pressure of the proletariat to
announce it as a republic with social institutions; how the Paris
proletariat was still incapable of going beyond the bourgeois republic
otherwise than in its fancy, in imagination; how even where
the republic acted in the service of the bourgeoisie when it really came to
action; how the promises made to it became an unbearable danger for the new
republic; how the whole life process of the Provisional Government was
comprised in a continuous fight against the demands of the proletariat.

In the National Assembly all France sat in judgment upon the Paris
proletariat. The Assembly broke immediately with the social illusions of the
February Revolution; it roundly proclaimed the bourgeois republic,
nothing but the bourgeois republic. It at once excluded the representatives of
the proletariat, Louis Blanc and Albert, from the Executive Commission[78] it had appointed; it threw
out the proposal of a special Labor Ministry and received with acclamation the
statement of Minister Trélat: “The question now is merely one of
bringing labor back to its old conditions.” [from Trélat's speech of 20 June 1848]

But all this was not enough. The February Republic was won by the workers
with the passive support of the bourgeoisie. The proletarians rightly regarded
themselves as the victors of February, and they made the arrogant claims of
victors. They had to be vanquished in the streets, they had to be shown that
they were worsted as soon as they did not fight with the bourgeoisie,
but against the bourgeoisie. Just as the February Republic, with its
socialist concessions, required a battle of the proletariat, united with the
bourgeoisie, against the monarchy, so a second battle was necessary to sever
the republic from socialist concessions, to officially work out the
bourgeois republic as dominant. The bourgeoisie had to refute, arms in
hand, the demands of the proletariat. And the real birthplace of the bourgeois
republic is not the February victory; it is the June
defeat.

The proletariat hastened the decision when, on the fifteenth of May, it
pushed its way into the National Assembly sought in vain to recapture its
revolutionary influence, and only delivered its energetic leaders to the
jailers of the bourgeoisie. Il faut en finir! This situation must end!
With this cry the National Assembly gave vent to its determination to force the
proletariat into a decisive struggle. The Executive Commission issued a series
of provocative decrees, such as that prohibiting congregations of people,[80] etc. The workers were
directly provoked, insulted, and derided from the tribune of the Constituent
National Assembly. But the real point of the attack was, as we have seen, the
national ateliers. The Constituent Assembly imperiously pointed these
out to the Executive Commission, which waited only to hear its own plan
proclaimed the command of the National Assembly.

The Executive Commission began by making admission to the national
ateliers more difficult, by turning the day wage into a piece wage, by
banishing workers not born in Paris to the Sologne, ostensibly for the
construction of earthworks. These earthworks were only a rhetorical formula
with which to embellish their exile, as the workers, returning disillusioned,
announced to their comrades. Finally, on June 21, a decree appeared in the
Moniteur which ordered the forcible expulsion of all unmarried workers
from the national ateliers or their enrollment in the army.[81]

The workers were left no choice; they had to starve or let fly. They
answered on June 22 with the tremendous insurrection in which the first great
battle was fought between the two classes that split modern society. It was a
fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order. The
veil that shrouded the republic was torn asunder.

It is well known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and ingenuity,
without leaders, without a common plan, without means and, for the most part,
lacking weapons, held in check for five days the army, the Mobile Guard, the
Paris National Guard, and the National Guard that streamed in from the
provinces. It is well known how the bourgeoisie compensated itself for the
mortal anguish it suffered by unheard–of brutality, massacring over 3000
prisoners. The official representatives of French democracy were steeped in
republican ideology to such an extent that it was only some weeks later that
they began to have an inkling of the significance of the June fight. They were
stupefied by the gunpowder smoke in which their fantastic republic
dissolved.

The immediate impression which the news of the June defeat made on us, the
reader will allow us to describe in the words of the “Neue Rheinische
Zeitung.” [5]

“The Executive Committee,[116] that last official
vestige of the February revolution, vanished like a ghost in the face of these
grave events. Lamartine's fireworks have turned into the incendiary shells of
Cavaignac.

“Fraternité, the brotherhood of antagonistic
classes, one of which exploits the other, this fraternity which in February was
proclaimed and inscribed in large letters on the facades of Paris, on every
prison and every barracks – this fraternity found its true, unadulterated
and prosaic expression in civil war, civil war in its most terrible aspect, the
war of labor against capital. This brotherhood blazed in front of the windows
of Paris on the evening of June 25, when the Paris of the bourgeoisie held
illuminations while the Paris of the proletariat was burning, bleeding,
groaning in the throes of death.

“This fraternité lasted only as long as there
was a consanguinity of interests between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Pedants sticking to the old revolutionary tradition of 1793; socialist
doctrinaires who begged alms for the people from the bourgeoisie and who were
allowed to deliver lengthy sermons and compromise themselves so long as the
proletarian lion had to be lulled to sleep; republicans who wanted to keep the
old bourgeois order in toto, but without the crowned head; members of the
Dynastic Opposition [117] on whom chance
imposed the task of bringing about the downfall of a dynasty instead of a
change of government; legitimists, [118] who did not want to
cast off their livery but merely to change its style – these were the
allies with whom the people had fought their February revolution. What the
people instinctively hated in Louis Philip was not Louis Philip himself, but
the crowned rule of a class, the capital on the throne. But magnanimous as
always, the people thought they had destroyed their enemy when they had
overthrown the enemy of their enemies, their common enemy.

“The February revolution was the nice revolution, the
revolution of universal sympathies, because the contradictions which erupted in
it against the monarchy were still undeveloped and peacefully dormant, because
the social struggle which formed their background had only achieved an
ephemeral existence, an existence in phrases, in words. The June revolution is
the ugly revolution, the nasty revolution, because the phrases have given place
to the real thing, because the republic has bared the head of the monster by
knocking off the crown which shielded and concealed it.

“Order! was Guizot's war-cry. Order!
shouted Sebastiani, the Guizotist, when Warsaw became Russian. Order!
shouts Cavaignac, the brutal echo of the French National Assembly and of the
republican bourgeoisie. Order! thundered his grape-shot as it tore into
the body of the proletariat.

“None of the numerous revolutions of the French
bourgeoisie since 1789 assailed the existing order, for they retained the class
rule, the slavery of the workers, the bourgeois system, even though the
political form of this rule and this slavery changed frequently. The June
uprising did assail this system. Woe to the June uprising!”

Woe to that June! Re-echoes Europe.

The Paris proletariat was forced into the June insurrection by the
bourgeoisie. This sufficed to mark its doom. Its immediate, avowed needs did
not drive it to engage in a fight for the forcible overthrow of the
bourgeoisie, nor was it equal to this task. The Moniteur had to inform
it officially that the time was past when the republic saw any occasion to bow
and scrape to its illusions, and only its defeat convinced it of the truth that
the slightest improvement in its position remains a utopia within the
bourgeois republic, a utopia that becomes a crime as soon as it wants
to become a reality. In place of the demands, exuberant in form but still
limited and even bourgeois in content, whose concession the proletariat wanted
to wring from the February Republic, there appeared the bold slogan of
revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the
Working class!

By making its burial place the birthplace of the bourgeois
republic, the proletariat compelled the latter to come out forthwith in
its pure form as the state whose admitted object it is to perpetuate the rule
of capital, the slavery of labor. Having constantly before its eyes the
scarred, irreconcilable, invincible enemy – invincible because its
existence is the condition of its own life – bourgeois rule, freed from
all fetters, was bound to turn immediately into bourgeois terrorism.
With the proletariat removed for the time being from the stage and bourgeois
dictatorship recognized officially, the middle strata of bourgeois society, the
petty bourgeoisie and the peasant class, had to adhere more and more closely to
the proletariat as their position became more unbearable and their antagonism
to the bourgeoisie more acute. Just as earlier they had to find the cause of
their distress in its upsurge, so now in its defeat.

If the June insurrection raised the self-assurance of the bourgeoisie all
over the Continent, and caused it to league itself openly with the feudal
monarchy against the people, who was the first victim of this alliances The
continental bourgeoisie itself. The June defeat prevented it from consolidating
its rule and from bringing the people, half satisfied and half out of humor, to
a standstill at the lowest stage of the bourgeois revolution.

Finally, the defeat of June divulged to the despotic powers of Europe the
secret that France must maintain peace abroad at any price in order to be able
to wage civil war at home. Thus the people's who had begun the fight for their
national independence were abandoned to the superior power of Russia, Austria,
and Prussian, but at the same time the fate of these national revolutions was
made subject to the fate of the proletarian revolution, and they were robbed of
their apparent autonomy, their independence of the great social revolution. The
Hungarian shall not be free, nor the Pole, nor the Italian, as long as the
worker remains a slave!

Finally, with the victories of the Holy Alliance, Europe has taken on a form
that makes every fresh proletarian upheaval in France directly coincide with a
world war. The new French revolution is forced to leave its national
soil forthwith and conquer the European terrain, on which alone the
social revolution of the nineteenth century can be accomplished.

Thus only the June defeat has created all the conditions under which France
can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only after being
dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricolor become the
flag of the European revolution – the red flag!

And we exclaim: The revolution is dead! Long live the
revolution!

Notes

1. Robert
Macaire, a swindler, is a character in Robert and Bertrand, a comedy by B.
Antier and F. Lemaitre (1834).

2. A term
applied to cafes of dubious reputation.

3. Le
National, a liberal Paris daily produced by A. Marrast and L. A.
Garnier-Pagès.

4. The
Constituent National Assembly, in power from May 4 1848 to May 1849.

5. Marx's
article, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of June 29, 1848, from which
he quotes here, appears on pages 147-150.

Contents | Part

The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Part II

From June 1848 to June 13, 1849

February 25, 1848, granted the republic to France, June
25 thrust the revolution upon her. And revolution, after June, meant:
overthrow of bourgeois society, whereas before February it meant:
overthrow of the form of government.

The June fight was led by the republican faction of the
bourgeoisie; with victory political power necessarily fell to its share. The
state of siege laid, gagged Paris, unresisting, at its feet, and in the
provinces there prevailed a moral state of siege, the threatening, brutal
arrogance of victorious bourgeoisie and the unleashed property fanaticism of
the peasants. No danger, therefore, from below!

The crash of the revolutionary might of the workers was simultaneously a
crash of the political influence of the democratic republicans; that
is, of the republicans in the sense of the petty bourgeoisie,
represented in the Executive Commission by Ledru-Rollin, in the Constituent
National Assembly by the part of the Montagne and in the press by the
“Réforme.” Together with the bourgeois republicans, they had
conspired on April 16 against the proletariat, together with them they had
warred against it in the June days. Thus they themselves blasted the background
against which their party stood out as a power, for the petty bourgeoisie can
preserve a revolutionary attitude toward the bourgeoisie only as long as the
proletariat stands behind it. The proletarians were dismissed. The sham
alliance which the bourgeois republicans, reluctantly and with reservations,
concluded with them during the epoch of the Provisional Government and the
Executive Commission was openly broken by the bourgeois republicans. Spurned
and repulsed as allies, they sank down to subordinate henchmen of the tricolor
men, from whom they could not wring any concessions but whose domination they
had to support whenever it, and with it the republic, seemed to be put in
jeopardy by the anti-republican bourgeois factions. Lastly, these factions, the
Orléanists and the Legitimists, were from the very beginning in a minority in
the Constituent National Assembly. Before the June days they dared to react
only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism – the June victory allowed
for a moment the whole of bourgeois France to greet its savior in Cavaignac;
and when, shortly after the June days, the anti-republican party regained
independence, the military dictatorship and the state of siege in Paris
permitted it to put out its antennae only very timidly and cautiously.

Since 1830 the bourgeois republican faction, in the person of its
writers, its spokesmen, its men of talent and ambition, its deputies, generals,
bankers, and lawyers, had grouped itself around a Parisian journal, the
National. In the provinces this journal had its branch newspapers. The
coterie of the National was the dynasty of the tricolor
republic. It immediately took possession of all state offices – of
the ministries, the prefecture of police, the post-office directorship, the
prefectures, the higher army officer posts – which had now become vacant.
At the head of the executive power stood its general, Cavaignac; its
editor in chief, Marrast, became permanent president of the Constituent
National Assembly. As master of ceremonies he at the same time did the honors,
in his salons, of the respectable republic.

Even revolutionary French writers, awed, as it were, by the republican
tradition, have strengthened the mistaken belief that the royalists dominated
the Constituent National Assembly. On the contrary, after the June days, the
Constituent Assembly remained the exclusive representative of bourgeois
republicanism, and it emphasized this aspect all the more resolutely, the
more the influence of the tricolor republicans collapsed outside the Assembly.
If the question was one of maintaining the form of the bourgeois
republic, then the Assembly had the votes of the democratic republicans at its
disposal; if one of maintaining the content, then even its mode of
speech no longer separated it from the royalist bourgeois factions, for it is
the interests of the bourgeoisie, the material conditions of its class rule and
class exploitation, that form the content of the bourgeois republic.

Thus it was not royalism but bourgeois republicanism that was realized in
the life and work of this Constituent Assembly, which in the end did not die,
nor was killed, but decayed.

For the entire duration of its rule, for as long as it gave its grand
performance of state on the proscenium,[83] an unbroken sacrificial feast was being
staged in the background – the continual sentencing by
courts–martial of the captured June insurgents or their deportation
without trial. The Constituent Assembly had the tact to admit that in the June
insurgents it was not judging criminals but wiping out enemies.

The first act of the Constituent National Assembly was to set up a
commission of inquiry into the events of June and of May 15, and into
the part played by the socialist and democratic party leaders during these
days. The inquiry was directly aimed at Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, and
Caussidière. The bourgeois republicans burned with impatience to rid themselves
of these rivals. They could have entrusted the venting of their spleen to no
more suitable object than M. Odilon Barrot, the former chief of the dynastic
opposition, the incarnation of liberalism, the nullité grave [self-important non-entity], the thoroughly shallow
person who not only had a dynasty to revenge, but even had to settle accounts
with the revolutionists for thwarting his premiership. A sure guarantee of his
relentlessness. This Barrot was therefore appointed chairman of the commission
of inquiry, and he constructed a complete legal process against the February
Revolution which may be summarized thus: March 17, demonstration;
April 16, conspiracy; May 15, attempt; June 23, civil
war! Why did he not stretch his erudite criminologist’s researches
as far back as February 24? The Journal des Débats inquired –
that is, to the foundation of Rome. The origin of states gets lost in
a myth that one may believe but may not discuss. Louis Blanc and Caussidière
were handed over to the courts. The National Assembly completed the work of
purging itself which it had begun on May 15.

The plan formed by the Provisional Government, and again taken up by
Goudchaux, of taxing capital – in the form of a mortgage tax was rejected
by the Constituent Assembly; the law that limited the working day to ten hours
was repealed; imprisonment for debt was once more introduced; the large section
of the French population that can neither read nor write was excluded from jury
service. Why not from the franchise also? Journals again had to deposit caution
money. The right of association was restricted.

No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of
property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois
– keepers of cafes and restaurants, marchands de vins [wine merchants], small traders, shopkeepers,
handicraftsman, etc. The shopkeeper had pulled himself together and marched
against the barricades in order to restore the traffic which leads from the
streets into the shop. But behind the barricade stood the customers and the
debtors; before it the creditors of the shop. And when the barricades were
thrown down and the workers were crushed and the shopkeepers, drunk with
victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barred by a savior
of property, an official agent of credit, who presented them with threatening
notices: Overdue promissory note! Overdue house rent! Overdue bond! Doomed
shop! Doomed shopkeeper!

Salvation of property! But the house they lived in was not their
property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they dealt
in were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate they ate
from, nor the bed they slept on belonged to them any longer. It was precisely
from them that this property had to be saved – for the
house-owner who let the house, for the banker who discounted the promissory
note, for the capitalist who made the advances in cash, for the manufacturer
who entrusted the sale of his commodities to these retailers, for the wholesale
dealer who had credited the raw materials to these handicraftsman.
Restoration of credit! But credit, having regained strength, proved
itself a vigorous and jealous god; it turned the debtor who could not pay out
of his four walls, together with wife and child, surrendered his sham property
to capital, and threw the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had
once more reared its head threateningly over the corpses of the June
insurgents.

The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers they
had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors.
Their bankruptcy, which since February had been dragging on in chronic fashion
and had apparently been ignored, was openly declared after June.

Their nominal property had been left unassailed as long as it was
of consequence to drive them to the battlefield in the name of property. Now
that the great issue with the proletariat had been settled, the small matter of
the épicier could in turn be settled. In Paris the mass of overdue paper
amounted to over 21,000,000 francs; in the provinces to over 1,000,000. The
proprietors of more than 7,000 Paris firms had not paid their rent since
February.

While the National Assembly had instituted an inquiry into political
guilt, going as far back as the end of February, the petty bourgeois on
their part now demanded an inquiry into civil debts up to February 24.
They assembled en masse in the Bourse hall and threateningly demanded, on
behalf of every businessman who could prove that his insolvency was due solely
to the stagnation caused by the revolution and that his business had been in
good condition on February 24, an extension of the term of payment by order of
a commerce court and the compulsory liquidation of creditors claims in
consideration of a moderate percentage payment. As a legislative proposal, this
question was dealt with in the National Assembly in the form of concordats
à l’amiable [amicable agreements]. The
Assembly vacillated; then it suddenly learned that at the same time, at the
Porte St. Denis, thousands of wives and children of the insurgents had prepared
an amnesty petition.

In the presence of the resurrected specter of June, the petty bourgeoisie
trembled and the National Assembly retrieved its implacability. The concordats
à l’amiable, the amicable settlements between debtor and creditor, were
rejected in their most essential points.

Thus long after the democratic representatives of the petty bourgeois had
been repulsed within the National Assembly by the republican representatives of
the bourgeoisie, this parliamentary breach received its civil, its real
economic meaning by the petty bourgeois as debtors being handed over to the
bourgeois as creditors. A large part of the former were completely ruined and
the remainder were allowed to continue their businesses only under conditions
which made them absolute serfs of capital. On August 22, 1848, the National
Assembly rejected the concordats à l’amiable; on September 19,
1848, in the midst of the state of siege, Prince Louis Bonaparte and the
prisoner of Vincennes, the Communist Raspail, were elected representatives of
Paris.[84] The
bourgeoisie, however, elected the usurious moneychanger and Orléanist Fould.
From all sides at once, therefore, open declaration of war against the
Constituent National Assembly, against bourgeois republicanism, against
Cavaignac.

It needs no argument to show how the mass bankruptcy of the Paris petty
bourgeois was bound to produce aftereffects far transcending the circle of its
immediate victims, and to convulse bourgeois commerce once more, while the
state deficit was swollen anew by the costs of the June insurrection, and state
revenues sank continuously through the hold-up of production, the restricted
consumption, and the decreasing imports. Cavaignac and the National Assembly
could have recourse to no other expedient than a new loan, which forced them
still further under the yoke of the finance aristocracy.

While the petty bourgeois had harvested bankruptcy and liquidation by order
of court as the fruit of the June victory, Cavaignac’s Janisseries, the
Mobile Guards, found their reward in the soft arms of the courtesans,
and as “the youthful saviors of society” they received all kinds of
homage in the salons of Marrast, the knight of the tricolor, who served
simultaneously as the Amphitryon and the troubadour of the respectable
republic. Meantime, this social favoritism and the disproportionately higher
pay of the Mobile Guard embittered the army, while all those national
illusions with which bourgeois republicanism, through its journal, the
National, had been able to attach to itself a part of the army and
peasant class under Louis Philippe vanished at the same time. The role of
mediator which Cavaignac and the National Assembly played in North
Italy in order, together with England, to betray it to Austria –
this one day of rule destroyed eighteen years of opposition on the part of the
National. No government was less national than that of the
National, none more dependent on England, and, under Louis Philippe,
the National lived by paraphrasing daily Cato’s dictum:
Carthaginem esse delendam [Carthage must be
destroyed], none was more servile toward the Holy Alliance, and from a
Guizot the National had demanded the tearing up of the Treaties of
Vienna.[85] The irony of
history made Bastide, the ex-editor for foreign affairs of the
National, Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, so that he might
refute every one of his articles in every one of his dispatches.

For a moment, the army and the peasant class had believed that,
simultaneously with the military dictatorship, war abroad and gloire had been
placed on the order of the day in France. But Cavaignac was not the
dictatorship of the saber over bourgeois society; he was the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie by the saber. And of the soldier they now required only the
gendarme. Under the stern features of antique-republican resignation Cavaignac
concealed humdrum submission to the humiliating conditions of his bourgeois
office. L’argent n’a pas de maître! Money has no master! He,
as well as the Constituent Assembly in general, idealized this old election cry
of the Third Estate by translating it into political speech: The bourgeoisie
has no king; the true form of its rule is the republic.

And the “great organic work” of the Constituent National
Assembly consisted in working out this form, in producing a republican
constitution. The rechristening of the Christian calendar as a
republican one, of the saintly Bartholomew as the saintly Robespierre, made no
more change in the wind and weather than this constitution made or was supposed
to make in bourgeois society. Where it went beyond a change of
costume, it put on record the existing facts. Thus it solemnly
registered the fact of the republic, the fact of universal suffrage, the fact
of a single sovereign National Assembly in place of two limited constitutional
chambers. Thus it registered and regulated the fact of the dictatorship of
Cavaignac by replacing the stationary, irresponsible hereditary monarchy with
an ambulatory, responsible, elective monarchy, with a quadrennial presidency.
Thus it elevated no less to an organic law the fact of the extraordinary powers
with which the National Assembly, after the horrors of May 15 and June 25, had
prudently invested its president in the interest of its own security. The
remainder of the constitution was a work of terminology. The royalist labels
were torn off the mechanism of the old monarchy and republican labels stuck on.
Marrast, former editor in chief of the National, now editor in chief
of the constitution, acquitted himself of this academic task not without
talent.

The Constituent Assembly resembled the Chilean official who wanted to
regulate property relations in land more firmly by a cadastral survey just at
the moment when subterranean rumblings announced the volcanic eruption that was
to hurl away the land from under his very feet. While in theory it accurately
marked off the forms in which the rule of the bourgeoisie found republican
expression, in reality it held its own only by the abolition of all formulas,
by force sans phrase [without any
exceptions], by the state of siege. Two days before it began
its work on the constitution, it proclaimed an extension of the state of siege.
Formerly constitutions had been made and adopted as soon as the social process
of revolution had reached a point of rest, the newly formed class relationships
had established themselves, and the contending factions of the ruling class had
had recourse to a compromise which allowed them to continue the struggle among
themselves and at the same time to keep the exhausted masses of the people out
of it. This constitution, on the contrary, did not sanction any social
revolution – it sanctioned the momentary victory of the old society over
the revolution.

The first draft of the constitution,[86] made before the June days, still contained
the droit au travail, the right to work, the first clumsy formula
wherein the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are summarized. It was
transformed into the droit à l’assistance, the right to public
relief, and what modern state does not feed its paupers in some form or other?
The right to work is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious
wish. But behind the right to work stands the power over capital; behind the
power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their
subjection to the associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage
labor, of capital, and of their mutual relations. Behind the “right
to work” stood the June insurrection. The Constituent Assembly,
which in fact put the revolutionary proletariat hors la loi, outside the law,
had on principle to throw the proletariat’s formula out of the
constitution, the law of laws; had to pronounce its anathema upon the
“right to work.” But it did not stop there. As Plato banned the
poets from his republic, so it banished forever from its republic the
progressive tax. And the progressive tax is not only a bourgeois
measure, which can be carried out within the existing relations of production
to a greater or less degree, it was the only means of binding the middle strata
of bourgeois society to the “respectable” republic, of reducing the
state debt, of holding the anti-republican majority of the bourgeoisie in
check.

In the matter of the concordats à l’amiable, the tricolor
republicans had actually sacrificed the petty bourgeoisie to the big
bourgeoisie. They elevated this isolated fact to a principle by the legal
prohibition of a progressive tax. They put bourgeois reform on the same level
as proletarian revolution. But what class then remained as the mainstay of
their republic? The big bourgeoisie. And its mass was anti-republican. While it
exploited the republicans of the National in order to consolidate again the old
relations of economic life, it thought, on the other hand, of exploiting the
once more consolidated social relations in order to restore the political forms
that corresponded to them. As early as the beginning of October, Cavaignac felt
compelled to make Dufaure and Vivien, previously ministers of Louis Philippe,
ministers of the republic, however much the brainless puritans of his own party
growled and blustered.

While the tricolor constitution rejected every compromise with the petty
bourgeoisie and was unable to win the attachment of any new social element to
the new form of government, it hastened, on the other hand, to restore its
traditional inviolability to a body that constituted the most hard–bitten
and fanatical defender of the old state. It raised the irremovability of
judges, which had been questioned by the Provisional Government, to an
organic law. The one king whom it had removed rose again, by the
score, in these irremovable inquisitors of legality.

The French press has analyzed from numerous aspects the contradictions of M.
Marrast’s constitution, for example, the coexistence of two sovereigns,
the National Assembly and the President, etc., etc.

The comprehensive contradiction of this constitution, however, consists in
the following: The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to
perpetuate – proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie – it puts in
possession of political power through universal suffrage. And from the class
whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the
political guarantees of this power. It forces the political rule of the
bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile
classes to victory and jeopardize the very foundations of bourgeois society.
From the first group it demands that they should not go forward from political
to social emancipation; from the others that they should not go back from
social to political restoration.

These contradictions perturbed the bourgeois republicans little. To the
extent that they ceased to be indispensable – and they were
indispensable only as the protagonists of the old society against the
revolutionary proletariat – they fell, a few weeks after their victory,
from the position of a party to that of a coterie. And they
treated the constitution as a big intrigue. What was to be constituted
in it was, above all, the rule of the coterie. The President was to be a
protracted Cavaignac; the Legislative Assembly a protracted Constituent
Assembly. They hoped to reduce the political power of the masses of the people
to a semblance of power, and to be able to make sufficient play with this sham
power itself to keep continually hanging over the majority of the bourgeoisie
the dilemma of the June days: realm of the National or realm of
anarchy.

The work on the constitution, which was begun on September 4, was finished
on October 23. On September 2 the Constituent Assembly had decided not to
dissolve until the organic laws supplementing the constitution were enacted.
Nonetheless, it now decided to bring to life the creation that was most
peculiarly its own, the President, on December 4, long before the circle of its
own activity was closed. So sure was it of hailing, in the homunculus of the
constitution, the son of his mother. As a precaution it was provided that if
none of the candidates received two million votes, the election should pass
over from the nation to the Constituent Assembly.

Futile provisions! The first day of the realization of the constitution was
the last day of the rule of the Constituent Assembly. In the abyss of the
ballot box lay its sentence of death. It sought the “son of his
mother” and found the “nephew of his uncle”. Saul Cavaignac
slew one million votes, but David Napoleon slew six million. Saul Cavaignac was
beaten six times over.

December 10, 1848, was the day of the peasant insurrection. Only
from this day does the February of the French peasants date. The symbol that
expressed their entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsily cunning,
knavishly naive, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic
burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery
and an indecipherable hieroglyphic for the understanding of the civilized
– this symbol bore the unmistakable physiognomy of the class that
represents barbarism within civilization. The republic had announced itself to
this class with the tax collector; it announced itself to the republic
with the emperor. Napoleon was the only man who had exhaustively
represented the interests and the imagination of the peasant class, newly
created in 1789. By writing his name on the frontispiece of the republic, it
declared war abroad and the enforcing of its class interests at home. Napoleon
was to the peasants not a person but a program. With banners, with beat of
drums and blare of trumpets, they marched to the polling booths shouting:
Plus d’impôts, à bas les riches, à bas la république, vive
l’Empereur! No more taxes, down with the rich, down with the
republic, long live the emperor! Behind the emperor was hidden the peasant war.
The republic that they voted down was the republic of the rich.

December 10 was the coup d’état of the peasants, which overthrew the
existing government. And from that day on, when they had taken a government
from France and given a government to her, their eyes were fixed steadily on
Paris. For a moment active heroes of the revolutionary drama, they could no
longer be forced back into the inactive and spineless role of the chorus.

The other classes helped to complete the election victory of the peasants.
To the proletariat, the election of Napoleon meant the deposition of
Cavaignac, the overthrow of the Constituent Assembly, the dismissal of
bourgeois republicanism, the cessation of the June victory. To the petty
bourgeoisie, Napoleon meant the rule of the debtor over the creditor. For
the majority of the big bourgeoisie, the election of Napoleon meant an
open breach with the faction of which it had had to make use, for a moment,
against the revolution, but which became intolerable to it as soon as this
faction sought to consolidate the position of the moment into a constitutional
position. Napoleon in place of Cavaignac meant to this majority the monarch, in
place of the republic, the beginning of the royalist restoration, a sly hint at
Orléans, the fleur-de-lis hidden beneath the violets.[87] Lastly, the army voted for
Napoleon against the Mobile Guard, against the peace idyll, for war.

Thus it happened, as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung stated, that the
most simple-minded man in France acquired the most multifarious significance.
Just because he was nothing, he could signify everything save himself.
Meanwhile, different as the meaning of the name Napoleon might be in the mouths
of the different classes, with this name each wrote on his ballot: Down with
the party of the National, down with Caivaignac, down with the
Constituent Assembly, down with the bourgeois republic. Minister Dufaure
publicly declared in the Constituent Assembly: December 10 is a second February
24.

Petty bourgeoisie and proletariat had voted en bloc for Napoleon,
in order to vote against Cavaignac and, by pooling their votes, to
wrest the final decision from the Constituent Assembly. The more advanced
sections of the two classes, however, put forward their own candidates.
Napoleon was the collective name of all parties in coalition against
the bourgeois republic; Ledru-Rollin and Raspail were the
proper names, the former of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the
latter of the revolutionary proletariat. The votes for Raspail – the
proletarians and their socialist spokesmen declared it loudly – were to
be merely a demonstration, so many protests against any presidency, that is,
against the constitution itself, so many votes against Ledru-Rollin, the first
act by which the proletariat, as an independent political party, declared its
separation from the democratic party. This party, on the other hand – the
democratic petty bourgeoisie and its parliamentary representative, the
Montagne[6] – treated the
candidature of Ledru-Rollin with all the seriousness with which it is in the
habit of solemnly duping itself. For the rest, this was its last attempt to set
itself up as an independent party, as against the proletariat. Not only the
republican bourgeois party, but also the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its
Montagne were beaten on December 10.

France now possessed a Napoleon side by side with a
Montagne, proof that both were only the lifeless caricatures of the
great realities whose names they bore. Louis Napoleon, with the emperor’s
hat and the eagle, parodied the old Napoleon no more miserably than the
Montagne, with its phrases borrowed from 1793 and its demagogic poses, parodied
the old Montagne. Thus the traditional 1793 superstition was stripped off at
the same time as the traditional Napoleon superstition. The revolution had come
into its own only when it had won its own, its original name,
and it could do that only when the modern revolutionary class, the industrial
proletariat, came dominatingly into its foreground. One can say that December
10 dumbfounded the Montagne and caused it to grow confused in its own mind, if
for no other reason than because that day laughingly cut short with a
contemptuous peasant jest the classical analogy to the old revolution.

On December 20 Cavaignac laid down his office and the Constituent Assembly
proclaimed Louis Napoleon President of the Republic, On December 19, the last
day of its sole rule, it rejected the proposal for amnesty for the June
insurgents. Would revoking the decree of June 27, under which it had condemned
15,000 insurgents to deportation without judicial sentence, not have meant
revoking the June battle itself.

Odilon Barrot, the last minister of Louis Philippe, became the first
minister of Louis Napoleon. Just as Louis Napoleon dated his rule, not from
December 10, but from a decree of the Senate of 1804, so he found a prime
minister who did not date his ministry from December 20, but from a royal
decree of February 24.[88]
As the legitimate heir of Louis Philippe, Louis Napoleon mollified the change
of government by retaining the old ministry, which, moreover, had not had time
to be worn out, since it had not found time to embark upon life.

The leaders of the royalist bourgeois factions advised him in this choice.
The head of the old dynastic opposition, who had unconsciously constituted the
transition to the republicans of the National, was still more fitted to
constitute with full consciousness the transition from the bourgeois republic
to the monarchy.

Odilon Barrot was the leader of the one old opposition party which, always
fruitlessly struggling for ministerial portfolios, had not yet been used up. In
rapid succession the revolution hurled all the old opposition parties to the
top of the state, so that they would have to deny, to repudiate their old
phrases not only in deeds but even in words, and might finally be flung all
together, combined in a repulsive commixture, on the dung heap of history by
the people. And no apostasy was spared this Barrot, this incarnation of
bourgeois liberalism, who for eighteen years had hidden the rascally vacuity of
his mind behind the serious demeanor of his body. If at certain moments the far
too striking contrast between the thistles of the present and the laurels of
the past startled the man himself, one glance in the mirror gave him back his
ministerial composure and human self-admiration. What beamed at him from the
mirror was Guizot, whom he had always envied, who had always mastered him,
Guizot himself, but Guizot with the Olympian forehead of Odilon. What he
overlooked were the ears of Midas.

The Barrot of February 24 first became manifest in the Barrot of December
20. Associated with him, the Orléanist and Voltairean, was the Legitimist and
Jesuit Falloux, as Minister of Public Worship.

A few days later, the Ministry of Home Affairs was given to Léon Faucher,
the Malthusian. Law, religion, and political economy! The ministry of Barrot
contained all this and, in addition, a combination of Legitimists and
Orléanists. Only the Bonapartist was lacking. Bonaparte still hid his longing
to signify Napoleon, for Soulouque did not yet play Toussaint
Louverture.

The party of the National was immediately relieved of all the higher
posts, where it had entrenched itself. The prefecture of police, the
post-office directorship, the procuratorship general, the mairie [mayor’s office] of Paris were all filled with old
creatures of the monarchy. Changarnier, the Legitimist, received the unified
supreme command of the National Guard of the Department of the Seine, of the
Mobile Guard and the troops of the line of the first military division;
Bugeaud, the Orléanist, was appointed commander in chief of the Alpine Army.
This change of officials continued uninterrupted under the Barrot government.
The first act of his ministry was the restoration of the old royalist
administration. The official scene was at once transformed – scenery,
costumes, speech, actors, supers, mutes, prompters, the position of the
parties, the theme of the drama, the content of the conflict, the whole
situation. Only the premundane Constituent Assembly remained in its place. But
from the hour when the National Assembly had installed Bonaparte, Bonaparte
Barrot, and Barrot Changarnier, France stepped out of the period of republican
constitution into the period of the constituted republic. And what place was
there for a Constituent Assembly in a constituted republic? After the earth had
been created, there was nothing else for its creator to do but flee to heaven.
The Constituent Assembly was determined not to follow his example; the National
Assembly was the last asylum of the party of the bourgeois republicans. If all
levers of executive power had been wrested from it, was there not left to it
constituent omnipotence? Its first thought was to hold under all circumstances
the position of sovereignty it occupied, and thence to reconquer the lost
ground. Once the Barrot Ministry was displaced by a ministry of the
National, the royalist personnel would have to vacate the palaces of the
administration forthwith and the tricolor personnel would triumphantly move in
again. The National Assembly resolved on the overthrow of the ministry and the
ministry itself offered an opportunity for the attack, a better one than the
Constituent Assembly itself could have invented.

It will be remembered that for the peasants Louis Bonaparte signified: No
more taxes! Six days he sat in the President’s chair, and on the seventh,
on December 27, his ministry proposed the retention of the salt tax,
whose abolition the Provisional Government had decreed. The salt tax shares
with the wine tax the privilege of being the scapegoat of the old French
financial system, particularly in the eyes of the country folk. The Barrot
Ministry could not have put into the mouth of the peasants’ choice a more
mordant epigram on his electors than the words: Restoration of the salt
tax! With the salt tax, Bonaparte lost his revolutionary salt – the
Napoleon of the peasant insurrection dissolved like an apparition, and nothing
remained but the great unknown of royalist bourgeois intrigue. And not without
intention did the Barrot Ministry make this act of tactlessly rude
disillusionment the first governmental act of the President.

The Constituent Assembly, for its part, eagerly seized the double
opportunity of overthrowing the ministry and, as against the elected choice of
the peasantry, setting itself up as the representative of peasant interests. It
rejected the proposal of the finance minister, reduced the salt tax to a third
of its former amount, thus increasing by sixty millions a state deficit of five
hundred and sixty millions, and, after this vote of no confidence,
calmly awaited the resignation of the ministry. So little did it comprehend the
new world that surrounded it and its own changed position. Behind the ministry
stood the President and behind the President stood six millions who had placed
in the ballot box as many votes of no confidence in the Constituent Assembly.
The Constituent Assembly gave the nation back its no-confidence vote. Absurd
exchange! It forgot that its votes were no longer legal tender. The rejection
of the salt tax only matured the decision of Bonaparte and his ministry to
finish the Constituent Assembly. There began that long duel which lasted the
entire latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly. January
29, March 31, and May 8 are the journées, the great days of this crisis,
just so many forerunners of June 13.

Frenchmen, for example Louis Blanc, have construed January 29 as the date of
the emergence of a constitutional contradiction, the contradiction between a
sovereign, indissoluble National Assembly born of universal suffrage and a
President who, to go by the wording, was responsible to the Assembly, but who,
to go by reality, was not only similarly sanctioned by universal suffrage and
in addition united in his own person all the votes that were split up a hundred
times and distributed among the individual members of the National Assembly,
but who was also in full possession of the whole executive power, above which
the National Assembly hovered as a merely moral force. This interpretation of
January 29 confuses the language of the struggle on the platform, through the
press, and in the clubs with its real content. Louis Bonaparte as against the
Constituent National Assembly – that was not one unilateral
constitutional power as against another; that was not the executive power as
against the legislative. That was the constituted bourgeois republic itself as
against the intrigues and ideological demands of the revolutionary faction of
the bourgeoisie that had founded it and was now amazed to find that its
constituted republic looked like a restored monarchy, and now desired forcibly
to prolong the constituent period with its conditions, its illusions, its
language, and its personages and to prevent the mature bourgeois republic from
emerging in its complete and peculiar form. As the Constituent National
Assembly represented Cavaignac, who had fallen back into its midst, so
Bonaparte represented the Legislative National Assembly that had not yet been
divorced from him, that is, the National Assembly of the constituted bourgeois
republic.

The election of Bonaparte could become explicable only, by putting in the
place of the one name its manifold meanings, by repeating itself in the
election of the new National Assembly. The mandate of the old was annulled by
December 10. Thus on January 29 it was not the President and the National
Assembly of the same republic that were face to face; it was the
National Assembly of the republic that was coming into being and the President
of the republic that had come into being, two powers that embodied quite
different periods in the life process of the republic; the one, the small
republican faction of the bourgeoisie that alone could proclaim the republic,
wrest it from the revolutionary proletariat by street fighting and a reign of
terror, and draft its ideal basic features in the constitution; and the other,
the whole royalist mass of the bourgeoisie that alone could rule in this
constituted bourgeois republic, strip the constitution of its ideological
trimmings, and realize by its legislation and administration the indispensable
conditions for the subjugation of the proletariat.

The storm which broke on January 29 gathered its elements during the whole
month of January. The Constituent Assembly wanted to drive the Barrot Ministry
to resign by its no-confidence vote. The Barrot Ministry, on the other hand,
proposed to the Constituent Assembly that it should give itself a definitive
no-confidence vote, decide on suicide, and decree its own dissolution.
On January 6, Rateau, one of the most obscure deputies, at the order of the
ministry brought this motion before the Constituent Assembly that in August had
determined not to dissolve until it had enacted a whole series of organic laws
supplementing the constitution. Fould, the ministerialist, bluntly declared to
it that its dissolution was necessary “for the restoration of the
deranged credit.” And did it not derange credit when it prolonged
the provisional stage and, with Barrot, again called Bonaparte in question,
and, with Bonaparte, the constituted republic Barrot the Olympian became a
raving Roland at the prospect of seeing the premiership he had finally
pocketed, which the republicans had already withheld from him for ten months,
again torn from him after scarcely two weeks’ enjoyment of it. Barrot,
confronting this wretched Assembly, out–tyrannized the tyrant. His
mildest words were, “No future is possible with it.” And actually
it did represent only the past. “It is incapable,” he added
ironically, “of providing the republic with the institutions which are
necessary for its consolidation.” Incapable indeed! Its bourgeois energy
was broken simultaneously with its exceptional antagonism to the proletariat,
and with its antagonism to the royalists its republican exuberance lived anew.
Thus it was doubly incapable of consolidating the bourgeois republic, which it
no longer comprehended, by means of the corresponding institutions.

Simultaneously with Rateau’s motion the ministry evoked a storm of
petitions throughout the land, and from all corners of France came flying
daily at the head of the Constituent Assembly bundles of billets-doux
[love-letters] in which it was more or less
categorically requested to dissolve and make its will. The Constituent
Assembly, on its side, called forth counter-petitions in which it caused itself
to be requested to remain alive. The election struggle between Bonaparte and
Cavaignac was renewed as a petition struggle for and against the dissolution of
the National Assembly; the petitions were to be belated commentaries on
December 10. This agitation continued during the whole of January.

In the conflict between the Constituent Assembly and the President, the
former could not refer back to the general election as its origin, for the
appeal was from the Assembly to universal suffrage. It could base itself on no
regularly constituted power, for the issue was the struggle against the legal
power. It could not overthrow the ministry by no-confidence votes, as it again
essayed to do on January 6 and 26, for the ministry did not ask for its
confidence. Only one possibility was left to it, that of insurrection.
The fighting forces of the insurrection were the republican part of the
National Guard, the Mobile Guard, and the centers of the
revolutionary proletariat, the clubs. The Mobile Guard, those heroes
of the June days, in December formed the organized fighting force of the
republican faction of the bourgeoisie, just as before June the national
ateliers had formed the organized fighting force of the revolutionary
proletariat. As the Executive Commission of the Constituent Assembly directed
its brutal attack on the national ateliers, when it had to put an end to
the now unbearable pretensions of the proletariat, so the ministry of Bonaparte
directed its attack on the Mobile Guard, when it had to put an end to the now
unbearable pretensions of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie. It ordered
the disbanding of the Mobile Guard. One half of it was dismissed and
thrown on the street, the other was organized on monarchist instead of
democratic lines, and its pay was reduced to the usual pay of troops of the
line. The Mobile Guard found itself in the position of the June insurgents and
every day the press carried public confessions in which it admitted
its blame for June and implored the proletariat to forgive it.

And the clubs? From the moment when the Constituent Assembly in the
person of Barrot called in question the President, and in the person of the
President the constituted bourgeois republic, and in the person of the
constituted bourgeois republic the bourgeois republic in general, all the
constituent elements of the February Republic necessarily ranged themselves
around it – all the parties that wished to overthrow the existing
republic and by a violent retrograde process to transform it into a republic of
their class interests and principles. The scrambled eggs were unscrambled, the
crystallisations of the revolutionary movement had again become fluid, the
republic that was being fought for was again the indefinite republic of the
February days, the defining of which each party reserved to itself. For a
moment the parties again took up their old February positions, without sharing
the illusions of February. The tricolor republicans on the National
again leaned on the democratic republicans of the Réforme and pushed
them as protagonists into the foreground of the parliamentary struggle. The
democratic republicans again leaned on the socialist republicans – on
January 27 a public manifesto announced their reconciliation and union –
and prepared their insurrectional background in the clubs. The ministerial
press rightly treated the tricolor republicans of the National as the
resurrected insurgents of June. In order to maintain themselves at the head of
the bourgeois republic, they called in question the bourgeois republic itself.
On January 26 Minister Faucher proposed a law on the right of association,[89] the first paragraph of
which read: “Clubs are forbidden.” He moved that this bill
immediately be discussed as urgent. The Constituent Assembly rejected the
motion of urgency, and on January 27 Ledru-Rollin put forward a proposition,
with 230 signatures appended to it, to impeach the ministry for violation of
the constitution. The impeachment of the ministry at times when such an act was
a tactless disclosure of the impotence of the judge, to wit, the majority of
the Chamber, or an impotent protest of the accuser against this majority itself
– that was the great revolutionary trump that the latter-day Montagne
played from now on at each high spot of the crisis. Poor Montagne! crushed by
the weight of its own name!

On May 15 Blanqui, Barbès, Raspall, etc., had attempted to break up the
Constituent Assembly by forcing an entrance into its hall at the head of the
Paris proletariat. Barrot prepared a moral May 15 for the same Assembly when he
wanted to dictate its self-dissolution and close the hall. The same Assembly
had commissioned Barrot to make the inquiry against the May accused, and now,
at the moment when he appeared before it like a royalist Blanqui, when it
sought for allies against him in the clubs, among the revolutionary
proletarians, in the party of Blanqui – at this moment the relentless
Barrot tormented it with the proposal to withdraw the May prisoners from the
Court of Assizes with its jury and hand them over to the High Court, the haute
cour devised by the party of the National. Remarkable how wild fear
for a ministerial portfolio could pound out of the head of a Barrot points
worthy of a Beaumarchais! After much vacillation the National Assembly accepted
his proposal. As against the makers of the May attempt, it reverted to its
normal character.

If the Constituent Assembly, as against the President and the ministers, was
driven to insurrection, the President and the ministers, as against
the Constituent Assembly, were driven to a coup d’etat, for they had no
legal means of dissolving it. But the Constituent Assembly was the mother of
the constitution and the constitution was the mother of the President. With the
coup d’etat the President tore up the constitution and extinguished his
republican legal title. He was then forced to pull out his imperial legal
title, but the imperial legal title woke up the Orléanist legal title and both
paled before the Legitimist legal title. The downfall of the legal republic
could shoot to the top only its extreme antipode, the Legitimist monarchy, at a
moment when the Orléanist party was still only the vanquished of February and
Bonaparte was still only the victor of December 10, when both could oppose to
republican usurpation only their likewise usurped monarchist titles. The
Legitimists were aware of the propitiousness of the moment; they conspired
openly. They could hope to find their Monk[90] in General Changarnier. The imminence of
the white monarchy was as openly announced in their clubs as was that
of the red republic in the proletarian clubs.

The ministry would have escaped all difficulties by a happily suppressed
rising. “Legality is the death of us,” cried Odilon Barrot. A
rising would have allowed it, under the pretext of salut public [public safety], to dissolve the Constituent Assembly,
to violate the constitution in the interests of the constitution itself. The
brutal behavior of Odilon Barrot in the National Assembly, the motion for the
dissolution of the clubs, the tumultuous removal of fifty tricolor prefects and
their replacement by royalists, the dissolution of the Mobile Guard, the ill
treatment of their chiefs by Changarnier, the reinstatement of Lerminier, the
professor who was impossible even under Guizot, the toleration of the
Legitimist braggadocio – all these were just so many provocations to
mutiny. But the mutiny remained mute. It expected its signal from the
Constituent Assembly and not from the ministry.

Finally came January 29, the day the decision was to be taken on the motion
of Mathieu (de la Drôme) for unconditional rejection of Rateau’s motion.
Legitimists, Orléanists, Bonapartists, Mobile Guard, Montagne, clubs –
all conspired on this day, each just as much against the ostensible enemy as
against the ostensible ally. Bonaparte, on horseback, mustered a part of the
troops on the Place de la Concorde; Changarnier play-acted with a display of
strategic maneuvers; the Constituent Assembly found its building occupied by
the military. This Assembly, the center of all the conflicting hopes, fears,
expectations, ferments, tensions, and conspiracies, this lionhearted Assembly
did not falter for a moment when it came nearer to the Weltgeist [world spirit] than ever. It was like the fighter who
not only feared to make use of his own weapons but also felt himself obliged to
maintain the weapons of his opponent unimpaired. Scorning death, it signed its
own death warrant and rejected the unconditional rejection of the Rateau
motion. Itself in a state of siege, it set limits to a constituent activity
whose necessary frame had been the state of siege of Paris. It revenged itself
worthily when on the following day it instituted an inquiry into the fright
that the ministry had given it on January 29. In this great comedy of intrigues
the Montagne showed its lack of revolutionary energy and political
understanding by allowing itself to be used by the party of the
National as the crier in the contest. The party of the National had
made its last attempt to continue to maintain, in the constituted republic, the
monopoly of rule it had possessed during the inchoate period of the bourgeois
republic. It was shipwrecked.

While in the January crisis it was a question of the existence of the
Constituent Assembly, in the crisis of March 21 it was a question of the
existence of the constitution – there of the personnel of the
National party, here of its ideal. There is no need to point out that
the respectable republicans surrendered the exaltation of their ideology more
cheaply than the worldly enjoyment of governmental power.

On March 21 Faucher’s bill against the right of association: the
suppression of the clubs was on the order of the day in the National
Assembly. Article 8 of the constitution guarantees to all Frenchmen the right
to associate. The prohibition of the clubs was therefore an unequivocal
violation of the constitution, and the Constituent Assembly itself was to
canonize the profanation of its holy of holies. But the clubs – these
were the gathering points, the conspiratorial seats of the revolutionary
proletariat. The National Assembly had itself forbidden the coalition of the
workers against its bourgeois. And the clubs – what were they but a
coalition of the whole working class against the whole bourgeois class, the
formation of a workers’ state against the bourgeois state? Were they not
just so many constituent assemblies of the proletariat and just so many
military detachments of revolt in fighting trim – what the constitution
was to constitute above all else was the rule of the bourgeoisie. By the right
of association the constitution, therefore, could manifestly mean only
associations that harmonized with the rule of the bourgeoisie, that is, with
bourgeois order. If for reasons of theoretical propriety it expressed itself in
general terms, were not the government and the National Assembly there to
interpret and apply it in a special case? And if in the primeval epoch of the
republic the clubs actually were forbidden by the state of siege, had they not
to be forbidden in the ordered, constituted republic by the law? The tri-color
republicans had nothing to oppose to this prosaic interpretation of the
constitution but the high-flown phraseology of the constitution. A section of
them, Pagnerre, Duclerc, etc., voted for the ministry and thereby gave it a
majority. The others, with the archangel Cavaignac and the father of the church
Marrast at their head, retired, after the article on the prohibition of the
clubs had gone through, to a special committee room, jointly with Ledru-Rollin
and the Montagne – “and held a council.” The National
Assembly was paralyzed; it no longer had a quorum. At the right time, M.
Crémieux remembered in the committee room that the way from here led directly
to the street and that it was no longer February, 1848, but March, 1849. The
party of the National, suddenly enlightened, returned to the National
Assembly’s hall of session, behind it the Montagne, duped once more. The
latter, constantly tormented by revolutionary longings, just as constantly
clutched at constitutional possibilities, and still felt itself more in place
behind the bourgeois republicans than in front of the revolutionary
proletariat. Thus the comedy was played. And the Constituent Assembly itself
had decreed that the violation of the letter of the constitution was the only
appropriate realization of its spirit.

There was only one point left to settle, the relation of the constituted
republic to the European revolution, its foreign policy. On May 8,
1849, unwonted excitement prevailed in the Constituent Assembly, whose term of
life was due to end in a few days. The attack of the French army on Rome, its
repulse by the Romans,[91]
its political infamy and military disgrace, the foul assassination of the Roman
republic by the French republic – the first Italian campaign of the
second Bonaparte – was on the order of the day. The Montagne had once
more played its great trump; Ledru-Rollin had laid on the President’s
table the inevitable bill of impeachment against the ministry, and this time
also against Bonaparte, for violation of the constitution.

The motive of May 8 was repeated later as the motive of June 13. Let us get
clear about the expedition to Rome.

As early as the middle of November, 1848, Cavaignac had sent a battle fleet
to Civita Vecchia in order to protect the Pope, to take him on board and ship
him over to France. The Pope was to consecrate the respectable republic, and to
insure the election of Cavaignac as President. With the Pope, Cavaignac wanted
to angle for the priests, with the priests for the peasants, and with the
peasants for the presidency. The expedition of Cavaignac, an election
advertisement in its immediate purpose, was at the same time a protest and a
threat against the Roman revolution. It contained in embryo France’s
intervention in favor of the Pope.

This intervention on behalf of the Pope, in association with Austria and
Naples against the Roman republic, was decided at the first meeting of
Bonaparte’s ministerial council, on December 23. Falloux in the ministry
– that meant the Pope in Rome – and in the Rome of the Pope.
Bonaparte no longer needed the Pope in order to become the President of the
peasants; but he needed the conservation of the Pope in order to conserve the
peasants of the President. Their credulity had made him President. With faith
they would lose credulity, and with the Pope, faith. And the Orléanists and
Legitimists in coalition, who ruled in Bonaparte’s name! Before the king
was restored, the power that consecrates kings had to be restored. Apart from
their royalism: without the old Rome, subject to his temporal rule, no Pope;
without the Pope, no Catholicism; without Catholicism, no French religion, and
without religion, what would become of the old French society? The mortgage the
peasant has on heavenly possessions guarantees the mortgage the bourgeois has
on peasant possessions. The Roman revolution was therefore an attack on
property, on the bourgeois order, dreadful as the June Revolution.
Reestablished bourgeois rule in France required the restoration of papal rule
in Rome. Finally, to smite the Roman revolutionists was to smite the allies of
the French revolutionists; the alliance of the counterrevolutionary classes in
the constituted French republic was necessarily supplemented by the alliance of
the French republic with the Holy Alliance, with Naples and Austria.

The decision of the ministerial council on December 23 was no secret to the
Constituent Assembly. On January 8 Ledru-Rollin had interpellated the ministry
about it; the ministry had denied it and the National Assembly had proceeded to
the order of the day. Did it trust the word of the ministry? We know it spent
the whole month of January giving the ministry no-confidence votes. But if it
was part of the ministry’s role to lie, it was part of the National
Assembly’s role to feign belief in its lie and thereby save republican
dehors [face].

Meanwhile Piedmont was beaten, Charles-Albert had abdicated, and the
Austrian army knocked at the gates of France.[92] Ledru-Rollin vehemently interpellated. The
ministry proved that it had only continued in North Italy the policy of
Cavaignac and Cavaignac only the policy of the Provisional Government, that is,
of Ledru-Rollin. This time it even reaped a vote of confidence from the
National Assembly and was authorized to occupy temporarily a suitable point in
Upper Italy to give support to peaceful negotiations with Austria concerning
the integrity of Sardinian territory and the question of Rome. It is known that
the fate of Italy is decided on the battlefields of North Italy. Hence Rome
would fall with Lombardy and Piedmont, or France would have to declare war on
Austria and thereby on the European counterrevolution. Did the National
Assembly suddenly take the Barrot Ministry for the old Committee of Public
Safety?[93] Or itself for
the Convention? Why, then, the military occupation of a point in Upper Italy?
This transparent veil covered the expedition against Rome.

On April 14, 14,000 men sailed under Oudinot for Civita Vecchia; on April 16
the National Assembly voted the ministry a credit Of 1,200,000 francs for the
maintenance of a fleet of intervention in the Mediterranean Sea for three
months. Thus it gave the ministry every means of intervening against Rome,
while it adopted the pose of letting it intervene against Austria. It did not
see what the ministry did; it only heard what it said. Such faith was not found
in Israel; the Constituent Assembly had fallen into the position of not daring
to know what the constituted republic had to do.

Finally, on May 8, the last scene of the comedy was played; the Constituent
Assembly urged the ministry to take swift measures to bring the Italian
expedition back to the aim set for it. Bonaparte that same evening inserted a
letter in the Moniteur in which he lavished the greatest appreciation
on Oudinot. On May 11 the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment
against this same Bonaparte and his ministry. And the Montagne, which instead
of tearing this web of deceit to pieces took the parliamentary comedy
tragically in order to play in it the role of Fouquier-Tinville, did not betray
its natural petty bourgeois calf’s hide under the borrowed lion’s
skin of the Convention!

The latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly is summarized thus:
on January 29 it admits that the royalist bourgeois factions are the natural
superiors of the republic constituted by it; on March 21, that the violation of
the constitution is its realization; and on May 11, that the bombastically
proclaimed passive alliance of the French republic with the struggling peoples
means its active alliance with the European counterrevolution.

This miserable Assembly left the stage after it had given itself the
satisfaction, two days before its first birthday, May 4, of rejecting the
motion of amnesty for the June insurgents. Its power shattered, held in deadly
hatred by the people, repulsed, maltreated, contemptuously thrown aside by the
bourgeoisie, whose tool it was, forced in the second half of its life to
disavow the first, robbed of its republican illusions, without having created
anything great in the past, without hope in the future, and with its living
body dying bit by bit, it was able to galvanize its own corpse into life only
by continually recalling and living through the June victory over and over
again, affirming itself by constantly repeated damnation of the damned. A
vampire living on the blood of the June insurgents!

It left behind a state deficit increased by the costs of the June
insurrection, by the loss of the salt tax, by the compensation it paid the
plantation owners for abolishing Negro slavery, by the costs of the Roman
expedition, by the loss of the wine tax, whose abolition it resolved upon when
already at its last gasp – a malicious old man, happy to impose on his
laughing heir a compromising debt of honor.

With the beginning of March the agitation for the election of the
Legislative National Assembly had commenced. Two main groups opposed
each other, the party of Order and the democratic socialist,
or Red, party; between the two stood the Friends of the
Constitution, under which name the tricolor republicans of the National
sought to put forward a party. The party of Order was formed directly
after the June days; only after December 10 had allowed it to cast off the
coterie of the National, of the bourgeois republicans, was the secret
of its existence, the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists into one
party, disclosed. The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions
which alternately – the big landed proprietors under the
restored monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the
industrial bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy – had
maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal name for the
predominant influence of the interests of the one faction, Orléans the
royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the other faction
– the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in which
both factions could maintain with equal power the common class interest without
giving up their mutual rivalry. If the bourgeois republic could not be anything
but the perfected and clearly expressed rule of the whole bourgeois class,
could it be anything but the rule of the Orléanists supplemented by the
Legitimists, and of the Legitimists supplemented by the Orléanists, the
synthesis of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The bourgeois
republicans of the National did not represent any large faction of
their class resting on economic foundations. They possessed only the importance
and the historical claim of having asserted, under the monarchy, as against the
two bourgeois factions that understood only their particular regime, the
general regime of the bourgeois class, the nameless realm of the
republic, which they idealized and embellished with antique arabesques,
but in which above all they hailed the rule of their coterie. If the party of
the National grew confused in its own mind when it descried the royalists in
coalition at the top of the republic founded by it, these royalists deceived
themselves no less concerning the fact of their united rule. They did not
comprehend that if each of their factions, regarded separately, by itself, was
royalist, the product of their chemical combination had necessarily to be
republican, that the white and the blue monarchy had to neutralize
each other in the tricolor republic. Forced by antagonism to the revolutionary
proletariat and the transition classes thronging more and more around it as
their center to summon their united strength and to conserve the organization
of this united strength, each faction of the party of Order had to assert, as
against the desire for restoration and the overweening presumption of the
other, their joint rule, that is, the republican form of bourgeois
rule. Thus we find these royalists in the beginning believing in an immediate
restoration, later preserving the republican form with foaming rage and deadly
invective against it on their lips, and finally confessing that they can endure
each other only in the republic and postponing the restoration indefinitely.
The enjoyment of the united rule itself strengthened each of the two factions,
and made each of them still more unable and unwilling to subordinate itself to
the other, that is, to restore the monarchy.

The party of Order directly proclaimed in its election program the
rule of the bourgeois class, that is, the preservation of the life conditions
of its rule: property, family, religion, order! Naturally it
represented its class rule and the conditions of its class rule as the rule of
civilization and as the necessary conditions of material production as well as
of the relations of social intercourse arising from it. The party of Order had
enormous money and resources at its command; it organized its branches
throughout France – it had all the ideologists of the old society in its
pay – it had the influence of the existing governmental power at its
disposal; it possessed an army of unpaid vassals in the whole mass of petty
bourgeois and peasants, who, still removed from the revolutionary movement,
found in the high dignitaries of property the natural representatives of their
petty prejudices. This party, represented throughout the country by countless
petty kings, could punish the rejection of their candidates as insurrection,
dismiss the rebellious workers, the recalcitrant farm hands, domestic servants,
clerks, railway officials, copyists, all the functionaries civilly subordinate
to it. Finally, here and there it could maintain the delusion that the
republican Constituent Assembly had prevented the Bonaparte of December 10 from
manifesting his wonderworking powers. We have not mentioned the Bonapartists in
connection with the party of Order. They were not a serious faction of the
bourgeois class, but a collection of old, superstitious invalids and young,
unbelieving soldiers of fortune. The party of Order was victorious in the
elections; it sent a large majority to the Legislative Assembly.

As against the coalesced counterrevolutionary bourgeois class, the sections
of the petty bourgeoisie and peasant class already revolutionized naturally had
to ally themselves with the high dignitary of revolutionary interests, the
revolutionary proletariat. We have seen how the democratic spokesmen of the
petty bourgeoisie in parliament, that is, the Montagne, were driven by
parliamentary defeats to the socialist spokesmen of the proletariat, and how
the actual petty bourgeoisie, outside of parliament, was driven by the
concordats à l’amiable [friendly
agreements], by the brutal enforcement of bourgeois interests, and by
bankruptcy to the actual proletarians. On January 27 Montagne and the
socialists had celebrated their reconciliation; at the great banquet of
February, 1849, they repeated their act of union. The social and the democratic
party, the party of the workers and that of the petty bourgeois, united to form
the Social-Democratic party, that is, the Red party.

Paralyzed for a moment by the agony that followed the June days, the French
republic had lived through a continuous series of feverish excitements since
the raising of the state of siege, since October 14. First the struggle for the
presidency, then the struggle between the President and the Constituent
Assembly; the struggle for the clubs; the trial of Bourges which, in contrast
with the petty figures of the President, the coalesced royalists, the
respectable republicans, the democratic Montagne, and the socialist doctrines
of the proletariat, caused the proletariat’s real revolutionists to
appear as primordial monsters such as only a deluge leaves behind on the
surface of society, or such as could only precede a social deluge; the election
agitation; the execution of the Bréa murderers;[95] the continual proceedings against the
press; the violent interference of the government with the banquets by police
action; the insolent royalist provocations; the exhibition of the portraits of
Louis Blanc and Caussidière on the pillory; the unbroken struggle between the
constituted republic and the Constituent Assembly, which each moment drove the
revolution back to its starting point, which each moment made the victors the
vanquished and the vanquished the victors and in an instant changed around the
positions of the parties and the classes, their separations and connections;
the rapid march of the European counterrevolution; the glorious Hungarian
fight; the armed uprisings in Germany;[96] the Roman expedition; the ignominious
defeat of the French army before Rome – in this vortex of the movement,
in this torment of historical unrest, in this dramatic ebb and flow of
revolutionary passions, hopes, and disappointments, the different classes of
French society had to count their epochs of development in weeks when they had
previously counted them in half-centuries. A considerable part of the peasants
and of the provinces was revolutionized. Not only were they disappointed in
Napoleon, but the Red party offered them, instead of the name, the content,
instead of illusory freedom from taxation, repayment of the milliard paid to
the Legitimists, the adjustment of mortgages, and the abolition of usury.

The army itself was infected with the revolutionary fever. In voting for
Bonaparte it had voted for victory, and he gave it defeat. In him it had voted
for the Little Corporal [Napoleon] behind whom the
great revolutionary general is concealed, and he once more gave it the great
generals behind whom the pipe-clay corporal shelters himself. There was no
doubt that the Red party, that is, the coalesced democratic party, was bound to
celebrate, if not victory, still, great triumphs; that Paris, the army, and a
great part of the provinces would vote for it. Ledru-Rollin, the
leader of the Montagne, was elected by five departments; no leader of the party
of Order carried off such a victory, no candidate belonging to the proletarian
party proper. This election reveals to us the secret of the
democratic-socialist party. If, on the one hand, the Montagne, the
parliamentary champion of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, was forced to unite
with the socialist doctrinaires of the proletariat – the proletariat,
forced by the terrible material defeat of June to raise itself up again through
intellectual victories and not yet enabled through the development of the
remaining classes to seize the revolutionary dictatorship, had to throw itself
into the arms of the doctrinaires of its emancipation, the founders of
socialist sects – the revolutionary peasants, the army, and the
provinces, on the other hand, ranged themselves behind the Montagne, which thus
became lord and master in the revolutionary army camp and through the
understanding with the socialists eliminated every antagonism in the
revolutionary party. In the latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly
it represented the Assembly’s republican fervor and caused to be buried
in oblivion its sins during the Provisional Government, during the Executive
Commission, during the June days. In the same measure as the party of the
National, in accordance with its half-and-half nature, had allowed itself to be
put down by the royalist ministry, the party of the Mountain, which had been
brushed aside during the omnipotence of the National, rose and
asserted itself as the parliamentary representative of the revolution. In fact,
the party of the National had nothing to oppose to the other, royalist factions
but ambitious personalities and idealistic humbug. The party of the Mountain,
on the contrary, represented a mass hovering between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, a mass whose material interests demanded democratic institutions.
In comparison with the Cavaignacs and the Marrasts, Ledru-Rollin and the
Montagne, therefore, represented the true revolution, and from the
consciousness of this important situation they drew the greater courage the
more the expression of revolutionary energy limited itself to parliamentary
attacks, bringing in bills of impeachment, threats, raised voices, thundering
speeches, and extremes which were pushed only as far as phrases. The peasants
were in about the same position as the petty bourgeoisie; they had more or less
the same social demands to put forward. All the middle strata of society, so
far as they were driven into the revolutionary movement, were therefore bound
to find their hero in Ledru-Rollin. Ledru-Rollin was the personage of the
democratic petty bourgeoisie. As against the party of Order, the
half-conservative, half-revolutionary, and wholly utopian reformers of this
order had first to be pushed to the forefront.

The party of the National, “the Friends of the Constitution
quand même [as is],” the
républicains purs et simples [republicans pure and
simple], were completely defeated in the elections. A tiny minority of
them was sent into the Legislative Chamber; their most noted leaders vanished
from the stage, even Marrast, the editor in chief and the Orpheus of the
respectable republic.

On May 28 the Legislative Assembly convened; on June 11 the collision of May
8 was renewed and, in the name of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill
of impeachment against the President and the ministry for violation of the
constitution, for the bombardment of Rome. On June 12 the Legislative Assembly
rejected the bill of impeachment, just as the Constituent Assembly had rejected
it on May 11, but the proletariat this time drove the Montagne onto the streets
– not to a street battle, however, but only to a street procession. It is
enough to say that the Montagne was at the head of this movement to know that
the movement was defeated, and that June, 1849, was a caricature, as ridiculous
as it was vile, of June, 1848. The great retreat of June 13 was eclipsed only
by the still greater battle report of Changarnier, the great man that the party
of Order improvised. Every social epoch needs its great men, and when it does
not find them, it invents them, as Helvétius says.

On December 20 only one half of the constituted bourgeois republic was in
existence: the President; on May 28 it was completed by the other
half, the Legislative Assembly. In June, 1848, the constituent
bourgeois republic, by an unspeakable battle against the proletariat, and in
June, 1849, the constituted bourgeois republic, by an unutterable comedy with
the petty bourgeoisie, engraved their names in the birth register of history.
June, 1849, was the nemesis of June, 1848. In June, 1849, it was not the
workers that were vanquished; it was the petty bourgeois, who stood between
them and the revolution, that were felled. June, I849, was not a bloody tragedy
between wage labor and capital, but a prison-filling and lamentable play of
debtors and creditors. The party of Order had won, it was all-powerful; it had
now to show what it was.

Notes

6. The
Jacobins, who sat in the “Montagne,” or raised seats at the back,
in the French National Convention, which met in Paris in September, 1792.

Contents | Part

The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Part III

Consequences of June 13, 1849

On December 20 the Janus head of the constitutional
republic had still shown only one face, the executive face with
the indistinct, plain features of L. Bonaparte; on May 28, 1849, it showed its
second face, the legislative, pitted with the scars that the orgies of the
Restoration and the July Monarchy had left behind. With the
Legislative National Assembly the phenomenon of the constitutional
republic was completed, that is, the republican form of government in
which the rule of the bourgeois class is constituted, the common rule,
therefore, of the two great royalist factions that form the French bourgeoisie,
the coalesced Legitimists and Orléanists, theparty of Order. While the
French republic thus became the property of the coalition of the royalist
parties, the European coalition of the counterrevolutionary powers embarked
simultaneously upon a general crusade against the last places of refuge of the
March revolutions. Russia invaded Hungary, Prussia marched against the army
defending the Reich constitution and Oudinot bombarded Rome. The European
crisis was evidently approaching a decisive turning point; the eyes of all
Europe were turned on Paris, and the eyes of all Paris on the Legislative
Assembly.

On June 11 Ledru-Rollin mounted its tribune. He made no speech; he
formulated an indictment of the ministers, naked, unadorned, factual,
concentrated, forceful.

The attack on Rome is an attack on the constitution; the attack on the Roman
republic is an attack on the French republic. Article 5 of the constitution[98] reads: “The French
republic never employs its forces against the liberty of any people
whatsoever” – and the President employs the French army against
Roman liberty. Article 54 Of the constitution forbids the executive power to
declare any war whatsoever without the consent of the National Assembly. The
Constituent Assembly's resolution of May 8 expressly commands the ministers to
make the Rome expedition conform with the utmost speed to its original mission;
it therefore just as expressly prohibits war on Rome – and Oudinot
bombards Rome. Thus Ledru-Rollin called the constitution itself as a witness
for the prosecution against Bonaparte and his ministers. At the royalist
majority of the National Assembly, he, the tribune of the constitution, hurled
the threatening declaration: “The republicans will know how to command
respect for the constitution by every means, be it even by force of
arms!” “By force of arms!” came the hundredfold echo
of the Montagne. The majority answered with a terrible tumult; the President of
the National Assembly called Ledru-Rollin to order – Ledru-Rollin
repeated the challenge, and finally laid on the President's table a motion for
the impeachment of Bonaparte and his ministers. By 361 votes to 203, the
National Assembly resolved to pass on from the bombardment of Rome to the next
item on the agenda.

Did Ledru-Rollin believe he could beat the National Assembly by means of the
constitution, and the President by means of the National Assembly?

To be sure, the constitution forbade any attack on the liberty of foreign
peoples, but what the French army attacked in Rome was, according to the
ministry, not “liberty” but the “despotism of anarchy.”
Had the Montagne still not comprehended, all experiences in the Constituent
Assembly notwithstanding, that the interpretation of the constitution did not
belong to those who had made it, but only to those who had accepted it? That
its wording must be construed in its viable meaning and that the bourgeois
meaning was its only viable meaning That Bonaparte and the royalist majority of
the National Assembly were the authentic interpreters of the constitution, as
the priest is the authentic interpreter of the Bible, and the judge the
authentic interpreter of the laws Should the National Assembly, freshly emerged
from the general elections, feel itself bound by the testamentary provisions of
the dead Constituent Assembly, whose will an Odilon Barrot had broken while it
was alive? When Ledru-Rollin cited the Constituent Assembly's resolution of May
8, had he forgotten that the same Constituent Assembly on May 11 had rejected
his first motion for the impeachment of Bonaparte and the ministers; that it
had acquitted the President and the ministers; that it had thus sanctioned the
attack on Rome as “constitutional”; that he only lodged an appeal
against a judgment already delivered – that he, lastly, appealed from the
republican Constituent Assembly to the royalist Legislative Assembly? The
constitution itself calls insurrection to its aid by summoning, in a special
article, every citizen to protect it. Ledru-Rollin based himself on this
article. But at the same time, are not the public authorities organized for the
defense of the constitution, and does not the violation of the constitution
begin only from the moment when one of the constitutional public authorities
rebels against the other? And the President of the republic, the ministers of
the republic, and the National Assembly of the republic were in the most
harmonious agreement.

What the Montagne attempted on June 11 was “an insurrection within
the limits of pure reason,” that is, a purely parliamentary
insurrection. The majority of the Assembly, intimidated by the
prospect of an armed rising of the popular masses, was, in Bonaparte and the
ministers, to destroy its own power and the significance of its own election.
Had not the Constituent Assembly similarly attempted to annul the election of
Bonaparte, when it insisted so obstinately on the dismissal of the
Barrot-Falloux Ministry?

Neither were there lacking from the time of the Convention models for
parliamentary insurrections which had suddenly transformed completely the
relation between the majority and the minority – and should the young
Montagne not succeed where the old had succeeded? – nor did relations at
the moment seem unfavorable for such an undertaking. Popular unrest in Paris
had reached an alarmingly high point – the army, according to its vote at
the election, did not seem favorably inclined toward the government; the
legislative majority itself was still too young to have become consolidated,
and in addition it consisted of old gentlemen. If the Montagne were successful
in a parliamentary insurrection, the helm of state would fall directly into its
hands. The democratic petty bourgeoisie, for its part, wished, as always, for
nothing more fervently than to see the battle fought out in the clouds over its
head between the departed spirits of parliament. Finally, both of them, the
democratic petty bourgeoisie and its representatives, the Montagne, would,
through a parliamentary insurrection, achieve their great purpose, that of
breaking the power of the bourgeoisie without unleashing the proletariat or
letting it appear otherwise than in perspective; the proletariat would have
been used without becoming dangerous.

After the vote of the National Assembly on June 11, a conference took place
between some members of the Montagne and delegates of the secret workers'
societies. The latter urged that the attack be started the same evening. The
Montagne decisively rejected this plan. On no account did it want to let the
leadership slip out of its hands; its allies were as suspect to it as its
antagonists, and rightly so. The memory of June, 1848, surged through the ranks
of the Paris proletariat more vigorously than ever. Nevertheless it was chained
to the alliance with the Montagne. The latter represented the largest part of
the departments – it had increased its influence in the army; it had at
its disposal the democratic section of the National Guard; it had the moral
power of the shopkeepers behind it. To begin the revolution at this moment
against the will of the Montagne would have meant for the proletariat,
decimated moreover by cholera and driven out of Paris in considerable numbers
by unemployment, to repeat uselessly the June days of 1848, without the
situation which had forced this desperate struggle. The proletarian delegates
did the only rational thing. They obligated the Montagne to compromise itself,
that is, to come out beyond the confines of the parliamentary struggle, in the
event that its bill of impeachment was rejected. During the whole of June 13
the proletariat maintained this same skeptically watchful attitude, and awaited
a seriously engaged irrevocable melee between the democratic National Guard and
the army, in order then to plunge into the fight and push the revolution
forward beyond the petty bourgeois aim set for it. In the event of victory a
proletarian commune was already formed which would take its place beside the
official government. The Parisian workers had learned in the bloody school of
June, 1848.

On June 12 Minister Lacrosse himself brought forward in the Legislative
Assembly the motion to proceed at once to the discussion of the bill of
impeachment. During the night the government had made every provision for
defense and attack; the majority of the National Assembly was determined to
drive the rebellious minority out into the streets; the minority itself could
no longer retreat; the die was cast; the bill of impeachment was rejected by
377 votes to 8. The “Mountain,” which had abstained from voting,
rushed resentfully into the propaganda halls of the “pacific
democracy,” the newspaper offices of the Démocratie Pacifique.[99]

Its withdrawal from the parliament building broke its strength as withdrawal
from the earth broke the strength of Antaeus, her giant son. Samsons in the
precincts of the Legislative Assembly, the Montagnards were only Philistines in
the precincts of the “pacific democracy.” A long, noisy, rambling
debate ensued. The Montagne was determined to compel respect for the
constitution by every means, “only not by force of arms.”
In this decision it was supported by a manifesto[100] and by a deputation of “Friends of the
Constitution.” “Friends of the Constitution” was what the
wreckage of the coterie of the National, the bourgeois-republican
party, called itself. While six of its remaining parliamentary representatives
had voted against, the others in a body voting for, the
rejection of the bill of impeachment, while Cavaignac placed his saber
at the disposal of the party of Order, the larger, extra-parliamentary part of
the coterie greedily seized the opportunity to emerge from its position of a
political pariah and to press into the ranks of the democratic party. Did they
not appear as the natural shield bearers of this party, which hid itself behind
their shield, behind their principles, behind the
constitution?

Till break of day the “Mountain” was in labor. It gave birth to
“a proclamation to the people,” which on the morning of
June occupied a more or less shamefaced place in two socialist journals.[101] It declared the
President, the ministers, and the majority of the Legislative Assembly
“outside the constitution” and summoned the National
Guard, the army, and finally also the people “to arise.”
“Long live the Constitution!” was the slogan it put
forward, a slogan that signified nothing other than “Down with the
revolution!”

In conformity with the constitutional proclamation of the Mountain, there
was a so-called peaceful demonstration of the petty bourgeois on June
13, that is, a street procession from the Chateau d'Eau through the Boulevards,
30,000 strong, mainly National Guardsmen, unarmed, with an admixture of members
of the secret workers' sections, moving along with the cry: “Long
live the Constitution!” which was uttered mechanically, icily, and
with a bad conscience by the members of the procession itself, and thrown back
ironically by the echo of the people that surged along the sidewalks, instead
of swelling up like thunder. From the many-voiced song the chest notes were
missing. And when the procession swung by the meeting hall of the
“Friends of the Constitution” and a hired herald of the
constitution appeared on the housetop, violently cleaving the air with his
claquer hat and from tremendous lungs letting the catch – cry
“Long live the Constitution!” fall like hail on the heads
of the pilgrims, they themselves seemed overcome for a moment by the comedy of
the situation. It is known how the procession, having arrived at the
termination of the Rue de la Paix, was received in the Boulevards by the
dragoons and chasseurs of Changarnier in an altogether unparliamentary way, how
in a trice it scattered in all directions, and how it threw behind it a few
shouts of “To arms” only in order that the parliamentary call to
arms of June 11 might be fulfilled.

The majority of the Montagne assembled in the Rue du Hasard scattered when
this violent dispersion of the peaceful procession, the muffled rumors of
murder of unarmed citizens on the Boulevards, and the growing tumult in the
streets seemed to herald the approach of a rising.Ledru-Rollin at the
head of a small band of deputies saved the honor of the Mountain. Under the
protection of the Paris Artillery, which had assembled in the Palais National,
they betook themselves to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers [Museum of arts and trades, an educational institution in
Paris], where the fifth and sixth legions of the National Guard were to
arrive. But the Montagnards waited in vain for the fifth and sixth legions;
these discreet National Guards left their representatives in the lurch; the
Paris Artillery itself prevented the people from throwing up barricades;
chaotic disorder made any decision impossible; the troops of the line advanced
with fixed bayonets; some of the representatives were taken prisoner, while
others escaped. Thus ended June 13.

If June 23, 1848, was the insurrection of the revolutionary proletariat,
June 13, I849, was the insurrection of the democratic petty bourgeois, each of
these two insurrections being the classically pure expression of the
class which had been its vehicle.

Only in Lyons did it come to an obstinate, bloody conflict.[102] Here, where the
industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat stand directly opposed to
one another, where the workers' movement is not, as in Paris, included in and
determined by the general movement, June 13, in its repercussion, lost its
original character. Wherever else it broke out in the provinces it did not
kindle fire – acold lightning flash.

June 13 closes the first period in the life of the constitutional
republic, which had attained its normal existence on May 28, 1849, with
the meeting of the Legislative Assembly. The whole period of this prologue is
filled with vociferous struggle between the party of Order and the Montagne,
between the big bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, which strove in vain
against the consolidation of the bourgeois republic, for which it had itself
continuously conspired in the Provisional Government and in the Executive
Commission, and for which, during the June days, it had fought fanatically
against the proletariat. The thirteenth of June breaks its resistance and makes
thelegislative dictatorship of the united royalists a fait accompli.
From this moment the National Assembly is only a Committee of Public Safety
of the party of Order.

Paris had put the President, the ministers, and the majority of the National
Assembly in a “state of impeachment”; they put Paris in a
“state of siege.” The Mountain had declared the majority
of the Legislative Assembly “outside the constitution”;
for violation of the constitution the majority handed over the Mountain to the
haute cour and proscribed everything in it that still had vital force.[103] It was decimated to a
rump without head or heart. The minority had gone so far as to attempt
aparliamentary insurrection – the majority elevated its
parliamentary despotism to law. It decreed new “standing
orders,” which annihilate the freedom of the tribune and authorize
the president of the National Assembly to punish representatives for violation
of the standing orders with censure, with fines, with stoppage of their
salaries, with suspension of membership, with incarceration. Over the rump of
the Montagne it hung the rod instead of the sword. The remainder of the
deputies of the Montagne owed it to their honor to make a mass exit. By such an
act the dissolution of the party of Order would have been hastened. It would
have had to break up into its original component parts the moment not even the
semblance of an opposition would hold it together any longer.

Simultaneously with their parliamentary power, the democratic petty
bourgeois were robbed of their armed power through the dissolution of
the Paris Artillery and the eighth, ninth, and twelfth legions of the National
Guard. On the other hand, the legion of high finance, which on June 13 had
raided the print shops of Boule and Roux, demolished the presses, played havoc
with the offices of the republican journals, and arbitrarily arrested editors,
compositors, printers, shipping clerks, and errand boys, received encouraging
approval from the tribune of the National Assembly. All over France the
disbanding of National Guards suspected of republicanism was repeated.

A new press law, a new law of association, a new law
on the state of siege, the prisons of Paris overflowing, the political
refugees driven out, all the journals that go beyond the limits of the
National suspended, Lyons and the five departments surrounding it
abandoned to the brutal persecution of military despotism, the courts
ubiquitous, and the army of officials, so often purged, purged once more
– these were the inevitable, the constantly recurring
commonplaces of victorious reaction, worth mentioning after the massacres
and the deportations of June only because this time they were directed not only
against Paris but also against the departments, not only against the
proletariat but, above all, against the middle classes.

The repressive laws by which the declaration of a state of siege was left to
the discretion of the government, the press still more firmly muzzled, and the
right of association annihilated, absorbed the whole of the legislative
activity of the National Assembly during the months of June, July, and
August.

However, this epoch is characterized not by the exploitation of victory
in fact, but in principle; not by the resolutions of the
National Assembly, but by the grounds advanced for these resolutions; not by
the thing but by the phrase; not by the phrase but by the accent and the
gesture which enliven the phrase. The brazen, unreserved expression of
royalist sentiments, the contemptuously aristocratic insults to the
republic, the coquettishly frivolous babbling of restoration aims in a word,
the boastful violation of republican decorum – give its peculiar
tone and color to this period. Long live the Constitution! was the battle cry
of the vanquished of June 13. The victors were therefore
absolved from the hypocrisy of constitutional, that is, republican, speech. The
counterrevolution subjugated Hungary, Italy, and Germany, and they believed
that the restoration was already at the gates of France. Among the masters of
ceremonies of the factions of Order there ensued a real competition to document
their royalism in the Moniteur, and to confess, repent, and crave pardon
before God and man for liberal sins perchance committed by them under the
monarchy. No day passed without the February Revolution being declared a
national calamity from the tribune of the National Assembly, without some
Legitimist provincial cabbage-junker solemnly stating that he had never
recognized the republic, without one of the cowardly deserters of and traitors
to the July Monarchy relating the belated deeds of heroism in the performance
of which only the philanthropy of Louis Philippe or other misunderstandings had
hindered him. What was admirable in the February days was not the magnanimity
of the victorious people, but the self-sacrifice and moderation of the
royalists, who had allowed it to be victorious. One Representative of the
People proposed to divert part of the money destined for the relief of those
wounded in February to the Municipal Guards,[104] who alone in those
days had deserved well of the fatherland. Another wanted to have an equestrian
statue decreed to the Duke of Orléans in the Place du Carrousel. Thiers called
the constitution a dirty piece of paper. There appeared in succession on the
tribune Orléanists, to repent of their conspiracy against the legitimate
monarchy by Legitimists, who reproached themselves with having hastened the
overthrow of monarchy in general by resisting the illegitimate monarchy;
Thiers, who repented of having intrigued against Molé; Molé, who repented of
having intrigued against Guizot; Barrot, who repented of having intrigued
against all three. The cry “Long live the Social-Democratic
Republic!” was declared unconstitutional; the cry “Long live the
Republic!” was prosecuted as social-democratic. On the anniversary of the
Battle of Waterloo,[105]
a representative declared: “I fear an invasion of the Prussians less than
the entry of the revolutionary refugees into France.” To the complaints
about the terrorism organized in Lyons and the neighboring departments,
Baraguay d'Hilliers answered: “I prefer the white terror to the red
terror.” And the Assembly applauded frantically every time an epigram
against the republic, against the revolution, against the constitution, for the
monarchy, or for the Holy Alliance fell from the lips of its orators. Every
infringement of the minutest republican formality – for example, that of
addressing the representatives as citoyens – filled the knights of order
with enthusiasm.

The by-elections in Paris on July 8, held under the influence of the state
of siege and of the abstention of a great part of the proletariat from the
ballot box, the taking of Rome by the French army, the entry into Rome of the
red eminences[106] and,
in their train, of inquisition and monkish terrorism, added fresh victories to
the victory of June and increased the intoxication of the party of Order.

Finally, in the middle of August, half with the intention of attending the
Department Councils just assembled, half through exhaustion from the
tendentious orgy of many months, the royalists decreed a two – month
recess of the National Assembly. With transparent irony they left behind a
commission of twenty-five representatives, the cream of the Legitimists and the
Orléanists, a Molé and a Changarnier, as proxies for the National Assembly and
as guardians of the republic. The irony was more profound than they
suspected. They, condemned by history to help to overthrow the monarchy they
loved, were destined by it to conserve the republic they hated.

The second period in the life of the constitutional republic, its
royalist period of sowing wild oats, closes with the recess of
the Legislative Assembly.

The state of siege in Paris had again been raised, the activities of the
press had again begun. During the suspension of the Social-Democratic papers,
during the period of repressive legislation and royalist bluster, the
Siècle, the old literary representative of the
monarchist-constitutional petty bourgeois, republicanized
itself; the Presse, the old literary exponent of the
bourgeois reformers, democratized itself; while the
National, the old classic organ of the republican bourgeois,
socialized itself.

The secret societies grew in extent and intensity in the same
degree that the public clubs became impossible. The workers'
industrial cooperatives, tolerated as purely commercial societies,
while of no account economically, became politically so many means of cementing
the proletariat. June 13 had struck off the official heads of the various
semirevolutionary parties; the masses that remained won a head of their own.
The knights of order had practiced intimidation by prophecies of the terror of
the red republic; the base excesses, the hyperborean atrocities of the
victorious counterrevolution in Hungary, in Baden, and in Rome washed the
“red republic” white. And the malcontent intermediate
classes of French society began to prefer the promises of the red republic with
its problematic terrors to the terrors of the red monarchy with its actual
hopelessness. No socialist in France spread more revolutionary propaganda than
Haynau. A chaque capacité selon ses oeuvres! [To each man of talent according to his work!]

In the meantime Louis Bonaparte exploited the recess of the National
Assembly to make princely tours of the provinces, the most hot-blooded
Legitimists made pilgrimages to Ems, to the grandchild of the saintly Louis,
and the mass of the popular representatives on the side of order intrigued in
the Department Councils, which had just met. It was necessary to make them
pronounce what the majority of the National Assembly did not yet dare
pronounce, an urgent motion for immediate revision of the
constitution. According to the constitution, it could not be revised
before 1852, and then only by a National Assembly called together expressly for
this purpose. If, however, the majority of the Department Councils expressed
themselves to this effect, was not the National Assembly bound to sacrifice the
virginity of the constitution to the voice of France? The National Assembly
entertained the same hopes in regard to these provincial assemblies as the nuns
in Voltaire's Henriade entertained in regard to the pandours. But, some
exceptions apart, the Potiphars of the National Assembly had to deal with just
so many Josephs of the provinces. The vast majority did not want to understand
the importunate insinuation. The revision of the constitution was frustrated by
the very instruments which were to have called it into being, by the votes of
the Department Councils. The voice of France, and indeed of bourgeois France,
had spoken and had spoken against revision.

At the beginning of October the Legislative National Assembly met once more
– tantum mutatus ab illo.[7] Its physiognomy was completely changed. The
unexpected rejection of revision on the part of the Department Councils had put
it back within the limits of the constitution and indicated the limits of its
term of life. The Orléanists had become mistrustful because of the pilgrimages
of the Legitimists to Ems; the Legitimists had grown suspicious because of the
Orléanists' negotiations with London; the journals of the two factions had
fanned the fire and weighed the reciprocal claims of their pretenders.
Orléanists and Legitimists grumbled in unison at the machinations of the
Bonapartists, which showed themselves in the princely tours, in the more or
less transparent emancipatory attempts of the President, in the presumptuous
language of the Bonapartist newspapers; Louis Bonaparte grumbled at a National
Assembly which found only the Legitimist-Orléanist conspiracy legitimate, at a
ministry which betrayed him continually to this National Assembly. Finally the
ministry was itself divided on the Roman policy and on the income tax
proposed by Minister Passy, decried as socialistic by the
conservatives.

One of the first bills of the Barrot Ministry in the reassembled Legislative
Assembly was a demand for a credit of 300,000 francs for the payment of a
widow's pension to the Duchess of Orléans! The National Assembly
granted it and added to the list of debts of the French nation a sum of seven
million francs. Thus while Louis Philippe continued to play successfully the
role of the pauvre honteux, the shamefaced beggar, the ministry dared
not move an increase of salary for Bonaparte nor did the Assembly appear
inclined to grant it. And Louis Bonaparte, as ever, vacillated in the dilemma:
Aut Caesar aut Clichy! [8]

The minister's second demand for a credit, one of nine million francs for
the costs of the Rome expedition, increased the tension between
Bonaparte on the one hand and the ministers and the National Assembly on the
other. Louis Bonaparte had inserted a letter to his military aide, Edgar Ney,
in the Moniteur, in which he bound the papal government to
constitutional guarantees. The Pope, on his part, had published an address,
motu proprio[110], in
which he rejected any limitation of his restored rule. Bonaparte's letter, with
studied indiscretion, raised the curtain on his cabinet in order to expose
himself to the eyes of the gallery as a benevolent genius who was, however,
misunderstood and shackled in his own house. It was not the first time that he
had coquetted with the “furtive flights of a free soul.”[9] Thiers, the reporter of
the commission, completely ignored Bonaparte's flight and contented himself
with translating the papal allocution into French. It was not the ministry but
Victor Hugo who sought to save the President through an order of the
day in which the National Assembly was to express its agreement with Napoleon's
letter.Allons donc! Allons donc! [Let's go
then!] With this disrespectful, frivolous interjection the majority
buried Hugo's motion. The policy of the President? The letter of the President?
The President himself? Allons donc! Allons donc! Who the devil takes
Monsieur Bonaparte seriously? Do you believe, Monsieur Victor Hugo, that we
believe you that you believe in the president?Allons donc! Allons
donc!

Finally, the breach between Bonaparte and the National Assembly was hastened
by the discussion on the recall of the Orléans and the Bourbons. In
default of the ministry, the President's cousin [Joseph
Bonaparte], son of the ex-king of Westphalia, had put forward this
motion, which had no other purpose than to push the Legitimist and the
Orléanist pretenders down to the same level, or rather a lower level than the
Bonapartist pretender, who at least stood in fact at the pinnacle of the
state.

Napoleon Bonaparte was disrespectful enough to make the recall of the
expelled royal families and the amnesty of the June insurgents
parts of one and the same motion. The indignation of the majority compelled him
to apologize immediately for this sacrilegious concatenation of the holy and
the impious, of the royal races and the proletarian brood, of the fixed stars
of society and of its swamp lights, and to assign each of the two motions to
its proper place. The majority energetically rejected the recall of the royal
family, and Berryer, the Demosthenes of the Legitimists, left no doubt
about the meaning of the vote. The civic degradation of the pretenders, that is
what is intended! It is desired to rob them of their halo, of the last majesty
that is left to them, the majesty of exile! What, cried Berryer, would
the pretenders think of the President, who, forgetting his august origin, came
here to live as a simple private individual? It could not have been more
clearly intimated to Louis Bonaparte that he had not gained the day by his
presence, that whereas the royalists in coalition needed him here in France as
a “neutral man” in the presidential chair, the serious
pretenders to the throne had to be kept out of profane sight by the fog of
exile.

On November 1, Louis Bonaparte answered the Legislative Assembly with a
message which in quite brusque words announced the dismissal of the Barrot
Ministry and the formation of a new ministry. The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was
the ministry of the royalist coalition, the Hautpoul Ministry was the ministry
of Bonaparte, the organ of the President as against the Legislative Assembly,
the ministry of the clerks.

Bonaparte was no longer the merely neutral man of December 10,
1848. His possession of the executive power had grouped a number of interests
around him, the struggle with anarchy forced the party of Order itself to
increase his influence, and if he was no longer popular, the party of
Order was unpopular. Could he not hope to compel the Orléanists and
the Legitimists, through their rivalry as well as through the necessity of some
sort of monarchist restoration, to recognize the neutral pretender?

From November 1, 1849, dates the third period in the life of the
constitutional republic, a period which closes with March 10, I850. The regular
game, so much admired by Guizot, of the constitutional institutions, the
wrangling between executive and legislative power, now begins. More, as against
the hankering for restoration on the part of the united Orléanists and
Legitimists, Bonaparte defends his title to his actual power, the republic; as
against the hankering for restoration on the part of Bonaparte, the party of
Order defends its title to its common rule, the republic; as against the
Orléanists, the Legitimists, and as against the Legitimists, the Orléanists,
defend the status quo, the republic. All these factions of the party of Order,
each of which has its own king and its own restoration in petto [secretly], mutually enforce, as against their rivals'
hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the
form in which the special claims remain neutralized and reserved the
republic.

Just as Kant makes the republic, so these royalists make the
monarchy the only rational form of state, a postulate of practical
reason whose realization is never attained, but whose attainment must always be
striven for and mentally adhered to as the goal.

Thus the constitutional republic had gone forth from the hands of the
bourgeois republicans as a hollow ideological formula to become a form full of
content and life in the hands of the royalists in coalition. And Thiers spoke
more truly than he suspects when he said: “We, the royalists, are the
true pillars of the constitutional republic.”

The overthrow of the ministry of the coalition and the appearance of the
ministry of the clerks has a second significance. Its Finance Minister was
Fould. Fould as Finance Minister signifies the official surrender of
France's national wealth to the Bourse, the management of the state's property
by the Bourse and in the interests of the Bourse. With the nomination of Fould,
the finance aristocracy announced its restoration in the Moniteur.
This restoration necessarily supplemented the other restorations, which form
just so many links in the chain of the constitutional republic.

Louis Philippe had never dared to make a genuine loup-cervier [stock-exchange wolf] finance minister. Just as his
monarchy was the ideal name for the rule of the big bourgeoisie, so in his
ministries the privileged interests had to bear ideologically disinterested
names. The bourgeois republic every where pushed into the forefront what the
different monarchies, Legitimist as well as Orléanist, had kept concealed in
the background. It made earthly what they had made heavenly. In place of the
names of the saints it put the bourgeois proper names of the dominant class
interests.

Our whole exposition has shown how the republic, from the first day of its
existence, did not overthrow but consolidated the finance aristocracy. But the
concessions made to it were a fate to which submission was made without the
desire to bring it about. With Fould, the initiative in the government returned
to the finance aristocracy.

The question will be asked how the coalesced bourgeoisie could bear and
suffer the rule of finance, which under Louis Philippe depended on the
exclusion or subordination of the remaining bourgeois factions.

The answer is simple.

First of all, the finance aristocracy itself forms a weighty, authoritative
part of the royalist coalition, whose common governmental power is denominated
republic. Are not the spokesmen and leading lights among the Orléanists the old
confederates and accomplices of the finance aristocracy? Is it not itself the
golden phalanx of Orleanism? As far as the Legitimists are concerned, under
Louis Philippe they had already participated in practice in all the orgies of
the Bourse, mine, and railway speculations. In general, the combination of
large landed property with high finance is a normal fact. Proof:
England; proof: even Austria.

In a country like France, where the volume of national production stands at
a disproportionately lower level than the amount of the national debt, where
government bonds form the most important subject of speculation and the Bourse
the chief market for the investment of capital that wants to turn itself to
account in an unproductive way – in such a country a countless number of
people from all bourgeois or semi-bourgeois classes must have an interest in
the state debt, in the Bourse gamblings, in finance. Do not all these
interested subalterns find their natural mainstays and commanders in the
faction which represents this interest in its vastest outlines, which
represents it as a whole?

What conditions the accrual of state property to high finance? The
constantly growing indebtedness of the state. And the indebtedness of the
state? The constant excess of its expenditure over its income, a disproportion
which is simultaneously the cause and effect of the system of state loans.

In order to escape from this indebtedness, the state must either restrict
its expenditure, that is, simplify and curtail the government organism, govern
as little as possible, employ as few personnel as possible, enter as little as
possible into relations with bourgeois society. This path was impossible for
the party of Order, whose means of repression, official interference in the
name of the state, and ubiquity through organs of state were bound to increase
in the same measure as the number of quarters increased from which its rule and
the conditions for the existence of its class were threatened. The gendarmerie
cannot be reduced in the same measure as attacks on persons and property
increase.

Or the state must seek to evade the debts and produce an immediate but
transitory balance in its budget by putting extraordinary taxes on the
shoulders of the wealthiest classes. But was the party of Order to sacrifice
its own wealth on the altar of the fatherland to stop the national wealth from
being exploited by the Bourse? Pas si bête! [Not
so stupid!]

Therefore, without a complete revolution in the French state, no revolution
in the French state budget. Along with this state budget necessarily goes the
lordship of the trade in state debts, of the state creditors, the bankers, the
money dealers, and the wolves of the Bourse. Only one faction of the party of
Order was directly concerned in the overthrow of the finance aristocracy
– the manufacturers. We are not speaking of the middle, of the
smaller people engaged in industry; we are speaking of the reigning princes of
the manufacturing interests, who had formed the broad basis of the dynastic
opposition under Louis Philippe. Their interest is indubitably reduction of the
costs of production and hence reduction of the taxes, which enter into
production, and hence reduction of the state debts, the interest on which
enters into the taxes, hence the overthrow of the finance aristocracy.

In England – and the largest French manufacturers are petty bourgeois
compared with their English rivals actually find the manufacturers, a Cobden, a
Bright, at the head of the crusade against the bank and the stock-exchange
aristocracy. Why not in France? In England industry predominates – in
France, agriculture. In England industry requires free trade; in France,
protective tariffs, national monopoly alongside the other monopolies. French
industry does not dominate French production; the French industrialists,
therefore, do not dominate the French bourgeoisie. In order to secure the
advancement of their interests as against the remaining factions of the
bourgeoisie, they cannot, like the English, take the lead of the movement and
simultaneously push their class interests to the fore; they must follow in the
train of the revolution, and serve interests which are opposed to the
collective interests of their class. In February they had misunderstood their
position; February sharpened their wits. And who is more directly threatened by
the workers than the employer, the industrial capitalists? The manufacturer,
therefore, of necessity became in France the most fanatical member of the party
of Order. The reduction of his profit by finance, what is that
compared with the abolition of profit by the proletariat?

In France, the petty bourgeois does what normally the industrial bourgeois
would have to do; the worker does what normally would be the task of the petty
bourgeois; and the task of the worker, who accomplishes that? No one. In France
it is not accomplished; in France it is proclaimed. It is not accomplished
anywhere within the national boundaries.[111] The class war within French society turns into a
world war, in which the nations confront one another. Accomplishment begins
only at the moment when, through the world war, the proletariat is pushed to
the fore of the people that dominates the world market, to the forefront in
England. The revolution, which finds here not its end, but its organizational
beginning, is no short-lived revolution. The present generation is like the
Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It not only has a new world to
conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to
cope with a new world.

Let us return to Fould.

On November 14, 1849, Fould mounted the tribune of the National Assembly and
expounded his system of finance: an apology for the old system of taxes!
Retention of the wine tax! Abandonment of Passy's income tax!

Passy, too, was no revolutionist; he was an old minister of Louis
Philippe's. He belonged to the Puritans of the Dufaure brand and to the most
intimate confidants of Teste[10],
the scapegoat of the July Monarchy. Passy, too, had praised the old tax system
and recommended the retention of the wine tax, but he had at the same time torn
the veil from the state deficit. He had declared the necessity for a new tax,
the income tax, if the bankruptcy of the state was to be avoided. Fould, who
had recommended state bankruptcy to Ledru-Rollin, recommended the state deficit
to the Legislative Assembly. He promised economies, the secret of which later
revealed itself in that, for example, expenditures diminished by sixty millions
while the floating debt increased by two hundred millions – conjurers'
tricks in the grouping of figures, in the drawing up of accounts, which all
finally amounted to new loans.

Alongside the other jealous bourgeois factions, the finance aristocracy
naturally did not act in so shamelessly corrupt a manner under Fould as under
Louis Philippe. But once it existed, the system remained the same: constant
increase in the debts, masking of the deficit. And in time the old Bourse
swindling came out more openly. Proof: the law concerning the Avignon Railway;
the mysterious fluctuations in government securities, for a brief time the
topic of the day throughout Paris; finally, the ill-starred speculations of
Fould and Bonaparte on the elections of March 10.

With the official restoration of the finance aristocracy, the French people
soon had to stand again before a February 24.

The Constituent Assembly, in an attack of misanthropy against its heir, had
abolished the wine tax for the year of our Lord 1850. New debts could not be
paid with the abolition of old taxes. Creton, a cretin of the party of
Order, had moved the retention of the wine tax even before the Legislative
Assembly recessed. Fould took up this motion in the name of the Bonapartist
ministry and on December 20, 1849, the anniversary of the day Bonaparte was
proclaimed President, the National Assembly decreed the restoration of the
wine tax.

The sponsor of this restoration was not a financier; it was the Jesuit chief
Montalembert. His argument was strikingly simple: Taxation is the
maternal breast on which the government is suckled. The government is the
instruments of repression; it is the organs of authority; it is the army; it is
the police; it is the officials, the judges, the ministers; it is the
priests. An attack on taxation is an attack by the anarchists on the
sentinels of order, who safeguard the material and spiritual production of
bourgeois society from the inroads of the proletarian vandals. Taxation is the
fifth god, side by side with property, the family, order, and religion. And the
wine tax is incontestably taxation and, moreover, not ordinary, but
traditional, monarchically disposed, respectable taxation. Vive l'impôt des
boissons! [Long live the tax on drinks!] Three
cheers and one cheer more!

When the French peasant paints the devil he paints him in the guise of a tax
collector. From the moment when Montalembert elevated taxation to a god, the
peasant became godless, atheist, and threw himself into the arms of the devil,
of socialism. The religion of order had forfeited him; the Jesuits had
forfeited him; Bonaparte had forfeited him. December 20, 1849, had irrevocably
compromised December 20, 1848. The “nephew of his uncle” was not
the first of his family whom the wine tax defeated, this tax which, in
Montalembert's phrase, heralds the revolutionary storm. The real, the great
Napoleon declared on St. Helena that the reintroduction of the wine tax had
contributed more to his downfall than all else, since it had alienated from him
the peasants of Southern France. As far back as under Louis XIV the favorite
object of the hatred of the people (see the writings of Boisguillebert and
Vauban), abolished by the first revolution, it was reintroduced by Napoleon in
a modified form in 1808. When the Restoration entered France, there trotted
before it not only the Cossacks,, but also the promises to abolish the wine
tax. The gentilhommerie [gentry] naturally
did not need to keep its word to the gens taillables à merci et
miséricorde [people taxed pitilessly]. The
year I830 promised the abolition of the wine tax. It was not its way to do what
it said or say what it did. The year 1848 promised the abolition of the wine
tax, just as it promised everything. Finally, the Constituent Assembly, which
promised nothing, made, as already mentioned, a testamentary provision whereby
the wine tax was to disappear on January 1, 1850. And just ten days before
January 1, 1850, the Legislative Assembly introduced it once more, so that the
French people perpetually pursued it, and when they had thrown it out the door
saw it come in again through the window.

The popular hatred of the wine tax is explained by the fact that it unites
in itself all the odiousness of the French system of taxation. The mode of its
collection is odious, the mode of its distribution aristocratic, for the rates
of taxation are the same for the commonest as for the costliest wines; it
increases, therefore, in geometrical progression as the wealth of the consumers
decreases, an inverted progressive tax. It accordingly directly provokes the
poisoning of the laboring classes by putting a premium on adulterated and
imitation wines. It lessens consumption, since it sets up octrois
[toll houses] before the gates of all towns of
over four thousand inhabitants and transforms each such town into a foreign
country with a protective tariff against French wine. The big wine merchants,
but still more the small ones, the marchands de vins, whose livelihood directly
depends on the consumption of wine, are so many avowed enemies of the wine tax.
And finally, by lessening consumption the wine tax curtails the producers'
market. While it renders the urban workers incapable of paying for wine, it
renders the wine growers incapable of selling it. And France has a wine-growing
population of about twelve million. One can therefore understand the hatred of
the people in general; one can in particular understand the fanaticism of the
peasants against the wine tax. And in addition they saw in its restoration no
isolated, more or less accidental event. The peasants have a kind of historical
tradition of their own, which is handed down from father to son, and in this
historical school it is muttered that whenever any government wants to dupe the
peasants, it promises the abolition of the wine tax, and as soon as it has
duped the peasants, it retains or reintroduces the wine tax. In the wine tax
the peasant tests the bouquet of the government, its tendency. The restoration
of the wine tax on December 20 meant: Louis Bonaparte is like the
rest. But he was not like the rest; he was a peasant discovery,
and in the petitions carrying millions of signatures against the wine tax they
took back the votes that they had given a year before to the “nephew of
his uncle.”

The country folk – over two-thirds of the total French population
– consist for the most part of so-called free landowners. The
first generation, gratuitously freed by the Revolution of 1789 from its feudal
burdens, had paid no price for the soil. But the following generations paid,
under the form of the price of land, what their semi-serf forefathers
had paid in the form of rent, tithes, corvee, etc. The more, on the one hand,
the population grew and the more, on the other hand, the partition of the soil
increased, the higher became the price of the parcels, for the demand for them
increased with their smallness. But in proportion as the price the peasant paid
for his parcel rose, whether he bought it directly or whether he had it
accounted as capital by his co-heirs, necessarily the indebtedness of the
peasant, that is, the mortgage, also rose. The claim to a debt
encumbering the land is termed a mortgage, a pawn ticket in respect of the
land. Just as privileges accumulated on the medieval estate,
mortgages accumulate on the modern small allotment. On the other hand,
under the system of parcelisation the soil is purely an instrument of
production for its proprietor. Now the fruitfulness of land diminishes in
the same measure as land is divided. The application of machinery to the land,
the division of labor, major soil – improvement measures, such as cutting
drainage and irrigation canals and the like, become more and more impossible,
while the unproductive costs of cultivation increase in the same
proportion as the division of the instrument of production itself. All this,
regardless of whether the possessor of the small allotment possesses capital or
not. But the more the division increases, the more does the parcel of land with
its utterly wretched inventory form the entire capital of the small allotment
peasant, the more does investment of capital in the land diminish, the more
does the peasant lack land, money, and education for making use of the progress
in agronomy, and the more does the cultivation of the soil retrogress. Finally,
the net proceeds diminish in the same proportion as the gross
consumption increases, as the whole family of the peasant is kept back
from other occupations through its holding and yet is not enabled to live by
it.

In the measure, therefore, that the population and, with it, the division of
the land increases, does the instrument of production, the soil,
become more expensive and its fertility decrease, does agriculture decline
and the peasant become loaded with debt. And what was the effect becomes,
in its turn, the cause. Each generation leaves behind another more deeply in
debt – each new generation begins under more unfavorable and more
aggravating conditions; mortgaging begets mortgaging, and when it becomes
impossible for the peasant to offer his small holding as security for new
debts, that is, to encumber it with new mortgages, he falls a direct victim to
usury, and usurious interest rates become so much the more exorbitant.

Thus it came about that the French peasant cedes to the capitalist, in the
form of interest on the mortgages encumbering the soil and in
the form of interest on the advances made by the usurer without
mortgages, not only ground rent, not only the industrial profit – in
a word, not only the whole net profit – but even a part of
the wages, and that therefore he has sunk to the level of the Irish
tenant farmer – all under the pretense of being a private
proprietor.

This process was accelerated in France by the ever growing burden
of taxes, by court costs called forth in part directly by the
formalities with which French legislation encumbers the ownership of land, in
part by the innumerable conflicts over parcels everywhere bounding and crossing
each other, and in part by the litigiousness of the peasants, whose enjoyment
of property is limited to the fanatical assertion of their title to their
fancied property, their property rights.

According to a statistical statement of 1840, the gross production of French
agriculture amounted to 5,237,178,000 francs. Of this the costs of cultivation
came to 3,552,000,000 francs, including consumption by the persons working.
There remained a net product of 1,685,178,000 francs, from which 550,000,000
had to be deducted for interest on mortgages, 100,000,000 for law officials,
350,000,000 for taxes, and 107,000,000 for registration money, stamp duty,
mortgage fees, etc. There was left one-third of the net product or 538,000,000;
when distributed over the population, not 25 francs per head net product.[112] Naturally, neither
usury outside of mortgage nor lawyers' fees, etc., are included in this
calculation.

The condition of the French peasants, when the republic had added new
burdens to their old ones, is comprehensible. It can be seen that their
exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the
industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The
individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through
mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the
peasant class through the state taxes. The peasant's title to property
is the talisman by which capital held him hitherto under its spell, the pretext
under which it set him against the industrial proletariat. Only the fall of
capital can raise the peasant; only an anti-capitalist, a proletarian
government can break his economic misery, his social degradation. The
constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters;
the social-democratic, the red republic, is the dictatorship
of his allies. And the scale rises or falls according to the votes the peasant
casts into the ballot box. He himself has to decide his fate. So spoke the
socialists in pamphlets, almanacs, calendars, and leaflets of all kinds. This
language became more understandable to him through the counter-writings of the
party of Order, which for its part turned to him, and which by gross
exaggeration, by its brutal conception and representation of the intentions and
ideas of the socialists, struck the true peasant note and overstimulated his
lust after forbidden fruit. But most understandable was the language of the
actual experience that the peasant class had gained from the use of the
suffrage, were the disillusionments overwhelming him, blow upon blow, with
revolutionary speed. Revolutions are the
locomotives of history.

The gradual revolutionizing of the peasants was manifested by various
symptoms. It early revealed itself in the elections to the Legislative Assembly
– it was revealed in the state of siege in the five departments bordering
Lyons; it was revealed a few months after June 13 in the election of a
Montagnard in place of the former president of the Chambre introuvable[11] by the Department of the Gironde;
it was revealed on December 20, 1849, in the election of a red in place of a
deceased Legitimist deputy[113] in the Department du Gard, that promised
land of the Legitimists, the scene of the most frightful infamies committed
against the republicans in 1794 and 1795 and the center of the white terror in
1815, when liberals and Protestants were publicly murdered. This
revolutionizing of the most stationary class is most clearly evident since the
reintroduction of the wine tax. The governmental measures and the laws of
January and February, 1850, are directed almost exclusively against the
departments and the peasants. The most striking proof of
their progress.

The Hautpoul circular, by which the gendarme was appointed
inquisitor of the prefect, of the subprefect, and, above all, of the mayor, and
by which espionage was organized even in the hidden corners of the remotest
village community; the law against the schoolteachers, by which they
(the men of talent, the spokesmen, the educators and interpreters of the
peasant class) were subjected to the arbitrary power of the prefect –
they, the proletarians of the learned class, were chased like hunted beasts
from one community to another; the bill against the mayors, by which
the Damocles sword of dismissal was hung over their heads, and they, the
presidents of the peasant communities, were every moment set in opposition to
the President of the Republic and the party of Order; the ordinance
which transformed the seventeen military districts of France into four
pashaliks and forced the barracks and the bivouac on the French as their
national salon; the education law, by which the party of Order
proclaimed unconsciousness and the forcible stupefaction of France as the
condition of its life under the regime of universal suffrage what were all
these laws and measures? Desperate attempts to reconquer the departments and
the peasants of the departments for the party of Order.

Regarded as repression, they were wretched methods that wrung the
neck of their own purpose. The big measures, like the retention of the wine
tax, of the 45-centime tax, the scornful rejection of peasant petitions for the
repayment of the milliard, etc., all these legislative thunderbolts struck the
peasant class all at once, wholesale, from the center; the laws and measures
cited made attack and resistance general, the topic of the day in
every hut; they inoculated every village with revolution; they localized
and peasantized the revolution.

On the other hand, do not these proposals of Bonaparte and their acceptance
by the National Assembly prove the unity of the two powers of the
constitutional republic, so far as it is a question of repression of anarchy
– that is, of all the classes that rise against the bourgeois
dictatorship? Did not Soulouque [Louis
Bonaparte], directly after his brusque message, assure the Legislative
Assembly of his dévouement [devotion] to
order, through the immediately following message of Carlier,[116] that dirty, mean
caricature of Fouché, as Louis Bonaparte himself was the shallow caricature of
Napoleon?

The education law shows us the alliance of the young Catholics with
the old Voltaireans. Could the rule of the united bourgeois be anything else
but the coalesced despotism of the pro-Jesuit Restoration and the
make–believe free–thinking July Monarchy? Had not the weapons that
the one bourgeois faction had distributed among the people against the other
faction, in their mutual struggle for supremacy, again been torn from it, the
people, since the latter was confronting their united dictatorship? Nothing has
aroused the Paris shopkeeper more than this coquettish étalage [display] of Jesuitism, not even the rejection
of the concordats à l'amiable [friendly
agreements].

Meanwhile the collisions between the different factions of the party of
Order, as well as between the National Assembly and Bonaparte, continued. The
National Assembly was far from pleased that Bonaparte, immediately after his
coup d'état, after appointing his own, Bonapartist ministry, summoned
before him the invalids of the monarchy, newly appointed prefects, and made
their unconstitutional agitation for his reelection as President the condition
of their appointment; that Carlier celebrated his inauguration with the closing
of a Legitimist club, or that Bonaparte founded a journal of his own, Le
Napoleon, which betrayed the secret longings of the President to the
public, while his ministers had to deny them from the tribune of the
Legislative Assembly. The latter was far from pleased by the defiant retention
of the ministry, notwithstanding its various votes of no confidence; far from
pleased by the attempt to win the favor of the noncommissioned officers by an
extra pay of four sous a day and the favor of the proletariat by a
plagiarisation of Eugène Sue's Mysteries by an honor loan bank; far from
pleased, finally, by the effrontery with which the ministers were made to move
the deportation of the remaining June insurgents to Algiers, in order to heap
unpopularity on the Legislative Assembly en gros, while the President
reserved popularity for himself en detail, by individual grants of
pardon.Thiers let fall threatening words about coups d'état and
coups de tête [rash acts], and the
Legislative Assembly revenged itself on Bonaparte by rejecting every proposed
law that he put forward for his own benefit, and by inquiring with noisy
mistrust, in every instance when he made a proposal in the common interest,
whether he did not aspire, through increase of the executive power, to augment
the personal power of Bonaparte. In a word, it revenged itself by a
conspiracy of contempt.

The Legitimist party, on its part, saw with vexation the more capable
Orléanists once more occupying almost all posts and centralization
increasing, while it sought its salvation principally in
decentralization. And so it was. The counterrevolution centralized
forcibly, that is, it prepared the mechanism of the revolution. It even
centralized the gold and silver of France in the Paris Bank through
the compulsory quotation of bank notes, and so created the ready war chest
of the revolution.

Lastly, the Orléanists saw with vexation the emergent principle of
legitimacy contrasted with their bastard principle, and themselves every moment
snubbed and maltreated as the bourgeois misalliance of a noble spouse.

Little by little we have seen peasants, petty bourgeois, the middle classes
in general, stepping alongside the proletariat, driven into open antagonism to
the official republic and treated by it as antagonists. Revolt against
bourgeois dictatorship, need of a change of society, adherence to
democratic-republican institutions as organs of their movement, grouping around
the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary power – these are the
common characteristics of the so-called party of social democracy, the
party of the red republic. This party of anarchy, as its
opponents christened it, is no less a coalition of different interests than the
party of Order. From the smallest reform of the old social disorder to
the overthrow of the old social order, from bourgeois liberalism to
revolutionary terrorism – as far apart as this lie the extremes that form
the starting point and the finishing point of the party of
“anarchy.”

Abolition of the protective tariff – socialism! For it strikes at the
monopoly of the industrial faction of the party of Order. Regulation
of the state budget – socialism! For it strikes at the monopoly of the
financial faction of the party of Order. Free admission of foreign
meat and corn – socialism! For it strikes at the monopoly of the third
faction of the party of Order, large landed property. The demands of
the free–trade party, that is, of the most advanced English bourgeois
party, appear in France as so many socialist demands. Voltaireanism socialism!
For it strikes at a fourth faction of the party of Order, the
Catholic. Freedom of the press, right of association, universal public
education – socialism, socialism! They strike at the general monopoly of
the party of Order.

So swiftly had the march of the revolution ripened conditions that the
friends of reform of all shades, the most moderate claims of the middle
classes, were compelled to group themselves around the banner of the most
extreme party of revolution, around the red flag.

Yet manifold as the socialism of the different large sections of
the party of anarchy was, according to the economic conditions and the total
revolutionary requirements of the class or fraction of a class arising out of
these, in one point it is in harmony: in proclaiming itself the
means of emancipating the proletariat and the emancipation of the
latter as its object. Deliberate deception on the part of some;
self-deception on the part of the others, who promote the world transformed
according to their own needs as the best world for all, as the realization of
all revolutionary claims and the elimination of all revolutionary
collisions.

Behind the general socialist phrases of the “party of
anarchy,” which sound rather alike, there is concealed the
socialism of the National, of the Presse, and of the
Siécle, which more or less consistently wants to overthrow the rule of
the finance aristocracy and to free industry and trade from their hitherto
existing fetters. This is the socialism of industry, of trade, and of
agriculture, whose bosses in the party of Order deny these interests, insofar
as they no longer coincide with their private monopolies. Petty bourgeois
socialism, socialism par excellence, is distinct from this bourgeois
socialism, to which, as to every variety of socialism, sections of the
workers and petty bourgeois naturally rally. Capital hounds this class chiefly
as its creditor, so it demands credit institutions; capital
crushes it by competition, so it demands associations
supported by the state; capital overwhelms it by concentration, so it
demands progressive taxes, limitations on inheritance, taking over of
large construction projects by the state, and other measures that forcibly
stem the growth of capital. Since it dreams of the peaceful achievement of
its socialism – allowing, perhaps, for a second February Revolution
lasting a brief day or so the coming historical process naturally appears to it
as an application of systems which the thinkers of society, whether in
companies or as individual inventors, devise or have devised. Thus they become
the eclectics or adepts of the existing socialist systems, of
doctrinaire socialism, which was the theoretical expression of the
proletariat only as long as it had not yet developed further into a free
historical movement of its own.

While this utopian doctrinaire socialism, which subordinates the
total movement to one of its stages, which puts in place of common social
production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in fantasy does
away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its requirements by
small conjurers' tricks or great sentimentality, while this doctrinaire
socialism, which at bottom only idealizes present society, takes a picture of
it without shadows, and wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of
present society; while the proletariat surrenders this socialism to the petty
bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different socialist leaders among
themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence
to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another
– the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary
socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself
invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of
the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the
proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class
distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of
production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations
that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all
the ideas that result from these social relations.

The scope of this exposition does not permit of developing the subject
further.

We have seen that just as in the party of Order the finance
aristocracy necessarily took the lead, so in the party of
“anarchy” the proletariat. While the different
classes, united in a revolutionary league, grouped themselves around the
proletariat, while the departments became ever more unsafe and the Legislative
Assembly itself ever more morose toward the pretensions of the French
Soulouque, the long deferred and delayed by–election of substitutes for
the Montagnards, proscribed after June 13, drew near.

The government, scorned by its foes, maltreated and daily humiliated by its
alleged friends, saw only one mean of emerging from this repugnant and
untenable position – revolt. A revolt in Paris would have
permitted the proclamation of a state of siege in Paris and the departments and
thus the control of the elections. On the other hand, the friends of order, in
face of a government that had gained victory over anarchy, were constrained to
make concessions, if they did not want to appear as anarchists themselves.

The government set to work. At the beginning of February, 1850, provocation
of the people by chopping down the trees of liberty. In vain. If the trees of
liberty lost their place, the government itself lost its head and fell back,
frightened by its own provocation. The National Assembly, however, received
this clumsy attempt at emancipation on the part of Bonaparte with ice-cold
mistrust. The removal of the wreaths of immortelles from the July column[118] was no more
successful. It gave part of the army an opportunity for revolutionary
demonstrations and the National Assembly the occasion for a more or less veiled
vote of no confidence in the ministry. In vain the government press threatened
the abolition of universal suffrage and the invasion of the Cossacks. In vain
was Hautpoul's direct challenge, issued to the Left in the Legislative Assembly
itself, to betake itself to the streets, and his declaration that the
government was ready to receive it. Hautpoul received nothing but a call to
order from the President, and the party of Order, with silent, malicious joy,
allowed a deputy of the Left to mock Bonaparte's usurpatory longings. In vain,
finally, was the prophecy of a revolution on February 24. The government caused
February 24 to be ignored by the people.

The proletariat did not allow itself to be provoked to revolt,
because it was on the point of making a revolution.

Unhindered by the provocations of the government, which only heightened the
general exasperation at the existing situation, the election committee, wholly
under the influence of the workers, put forward three candidates for Paris:
Deflotte, Vidal, and Carnot. Deflotte was a June deportee,
amnestied through one of Bonaparte's popularity-seeking ideas; he was a friend
of Blanqui and had taken part in the attempt of May 15. Vidal, known
as a communist writer through his book Concerning the Distribution of Wealth,
was formerly secretary to Louis Blanc in the Luxembourg Commission.
Carnot, son of the man of the Convention who had organized the
victory, the least compromised member of the National party, Minister of
Education in the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission, was
through his democratic public education bill a living protest against the
education law of the Jesuits. These three candidates represented the three
allied classes: at the head, the June insurgent, the representative of the
revolutionary proletariat; next to him the doctrinaire socialist, the
representative of the socialist petty bourgeoisie; finally, the third, the
representative of the republican bourgeois party whose democratic formulas had
gained a socialist significance vis-a-vis the party of Order and had long lost
their own significance. This was a general coalition against the
bourgeoisie and the government, as in February. But this time the
proletariat was at the head of the revolutionary league.

In spite of all efforts the socialist candidates won. The army itself voted
for the June insurgent against its own War Minister La Hitte. The party of
Order was thunderstruck. The elections in the departments did not solace them;
the departments gave a majority to the Montagnards.

The election of March 10, 1850! It was the revocation of June,
1848: the butchers and deportees of the June insurgents returned to the
National Assembly but returned, bowed down, in the train of the deported, and
with their principles on their lips. It was the revocation of June 13,
1849: the Montagne, proscribed by the National Assembly, returned to the
National Assembly, but as advance trumpeters of the revolution, no longer as
its commanders. It was the revocation of December 10: Napoleon had
lost out with his Minister La Hitte. The parliamentary history of France knows
only one analogy: the rejection of d'Haussez, minister of Charles X, in 1830.
Finally, the election of March 10, 1850, was the cancellation of the election
of May 13, which had given the party of Order a majority. The election of March
10 protested against the majority of May 13. March 10 was a revolution. Behind
the ballots lie the paving stones.

“The vote of March 10 means war,” shouted Ségur d'Aguesseau, one
of the most advanced members of the party of Order.

With March 10, 1850, the constitutional republic entered a new phase,
the phase of its dissolution. The different factions of the majority
are again united among themselves and with Bonaparte; they are again the
saviors of order – he is again their neutral man. If they remember that
they are royalists, it happens only from despair of the possibility of a
bourgeois republic; if he remembers that he is a pretender, it happens only
because he despairs of remaining President.

At the command of the party of Order, Bonaparte answers the election of
Deflotte, the June insurgent, by appointing Baroche Minister of
Internal Affairs, Baroche, the accuser of Blanqui and Barbès, of Ledru-Rollin
and Guinard. The Legislative Assembly answers the election of Carnot
by adopting the education law, the election of Vidal by suppressing
the socialist press. The party of Order seeks to blare away its own fears by
the trumpet blasts of its press. “The sword is holy,” cries one of
its organs; “the defenders of order must take the offensive against the
Red party,” cries another; “between socialism and society there is
a duel to the death, a war without surcease or mercy; in this duel of
desperation one or the other must go under; if society does not annihilate
socialism, socialism will annihilate society,” crows a third cock of
Order. Throw up the barricades of order, the barricades of religion, the
barricades of the family! An end must be made of the 127,000 voters of Paris! A
Bartholomew's Night for the socialists! And the party of Order believes for a
moment in its own certainty of victory.

Their organs hold forth most fanatically of all against the
“boutiquiers [tradesmen] of
Paris.” The June insurgent of Paris elected by the shopkeepers of
Paris as their representative! This means that a second June, 1848, is
impossible; this means that a second June 13, 1849, is impossible; this means
that the moral influence of capital is broken; this means that the bourgeois
assembly now represents only the bourgeoisie; this means that big property is
lost, because its vassal, small property, seeks its salvation in the camp of
the propertyless.

The party of Order naturally returns to its inevitable commonplace.
“More repression,” it cries, “tenfold
repression!” But its power of repression has diminished tenfold,
while resistance has increased a hundredfold. Must not the chief instrument of
repression, the army, itself be repressed? And the party of Order speaks its
last word: “The iron ring of suffocating legality must be broken. The
constitutional republic is impossible. We must fight with our true
weapons; since February, 1848, we have fought the revolution with its weapons
and on its terrain – , we have accepted its institutions; the
constitution is a fortress which safeguards only the besiegers, not the
besieged! By smuggling ourselves into holy Ilion in the belly of the Trojan
horse, we have, unlike our forefathers, the Grecs[12], not conquered the hostile town, but made
prisoners of ourselves.

The foundation of the constitution, however, is universal suffrage.
Annihilation of universal suffrage – such is the last word of
the party of Order, of the bourgeois dictatorship.

On May 4, 1848, on December 20, 1848, on May 13, 1849, and on July 8, 1849,
universal suffrage admitted that they were right.[119] On March 10, 1850, universal suffrage admitted
that it had itself been wrong. Bourgeois rule as the outcome and result of
universal suffrage, as the express act of the sovereign will of the people
– that is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution. But has the
constitution any further meaning from the moment that the content of this
suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer bourgeois rule? Is it not the
duty of the bourgeoisie so to regulate the suffrage that it wills the
reasonable, its rule? By ever and anon putting an end to the existing state
power and creating it anew out of itself, does not universal suffrage put an
end to all stability, does it not every moment question all the powers that be,
does it not annihilate authority, does it not threaten to elevate anarchy
itself to the position of authority? After March 10, 1850, who would still
doubt it?

By repudiating universal suffrage, with which it hitherto draped itself and
from which it sucked its omnipotence, the bourgeoisie openly confesses,
“Our dictatorship has hitherto existed by the will of the people; it
must now be consolidated against the will of the people.” And,
consistently, it seeks its props no longer within France, but without,
in foreign countries, in invasion.

With the invasion, this second Coblenz[13], its seat established in France itself, rouses all
the national passions against itself. With the attack on universal suffrage it
provides a general pretext for the new revolution, and the revolution
requires such a pretext. Every special pretext would divide the
factions of the revolutionary league, and give prominence to their differences.
The general pretext stuns the semi-revolutionary classes; it permits
them to deceive themselves concerning the definite character of the
coming revolution, concerning the consequences of their own act. Every
revolution requires a question for discussion at banquets. Universal suffrage
is the banquet question of the new revolution.

The bourgeois factions in coalition, however, are already
condemned, since they take flight from the only possible form of their united
power, from the most potent and complete form of their class rule, the
constitutional republic, back to the subordinate, incomplete, weaker
form of monarchy. They resemble the old man who in order to regain his
youthful strength fetched out his boyhood garments and suffered torment trying
to get his withered limbs into them. Their republic had the sole merit
of being the hothouse of the revolution.

March 10, 1850, bears the inscription:

Après moi le déluge! After me the deluge![14]

Notes

7. How great
the change since then (Virgil, Aeneid).

8. Either
Caesar or Clichy. Clichy was a debtors' prison in Paris.

9. From Georg
Herwegh, “Aus den Bergen” (“From the Mountains”).

10. Note
by Engels to the 1895 edition: On July 8, 1847, before the Chamber of
Peers in Paris, began the trial of Parmentier and General Cubières for bribery
of officials with a view to obtaining a salt works concession, and of the then
Minister of Public Works, Teste, for accepting such money bribes. The latter,
during the trial, attempted to commit suicide. All were sentenced to pay heavy
fines, Teste, in addition, to three years' imprisonment.

11. Note
by Engels to the 1895 edition: This is the name given by history to the
fanatically ultraroyalist and reactionary Chamber of Deputies elected
immediately after the second overthrow of Napoleon, in 1815.

12. Note
by Engels to the 1895 edition: A play on words: Greeks, but also
professional cheats.

13. Coblenz
was the center of the counterrevolutionary emigres during the French
Revolution.

14. Words
attributed to Louis XV.

Contents | Part

The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Part IV

The Abolition of Universal Suffrage in 1850[14]

The same symptoms have shown themselves in France since
1849, and particularly since the beginning of 1850. The Parisian industries are
abundantly employed and the cotton factories of Rouen and Mulhouse are also
doing pretty well, although here, as in England, the high prices of the raw
material have exercised a retarding influence. The development of prosperity in
France was, in addition, especially promoted by the comprehensive tariff reform
in Spain and by the reduction of the duties on various luxury articles in
Mexico; the export of French commodities to both markets has considerably
increased. The growth of capital in France led to a series of speculations, for
which the exploitation of the California gold mines on a large scale served as
a pretext.[121] A swarm
of companies have sprung up; the low denomination of their shares and their
socialist-colored prospectuses appeal directly to the purses of the petty
bourgeois and the workers, but all and sundry result in that sheer swindling
which is characteristic of the French and Chinese alone. One of these companies
is even patronized directly by the government. The import duties in France
during the first nine months of 1848 amounted to 63,000,000 francs, of 1849 to
95,000,000 francs, and of 1850 to 93,000,000 francs. Moreover, in the month of
September, 1850, they again rose by more than a million compared with the same
month of 1849. Exports also rose in 1849, and still more in 1850.

The most striking proof of restored prosperity is the Bank's reintroduction
of specie payment by the law of August 6, 1850. On March 15, 1848, the Bank had
been authorized to suspend specie payment. Its note circulation, including that
of the provincial banks, amounted at that time to 373,000,000 francs
(14,920,000 pounds). On November 2, 1849, this circulation amounted to
482,000,000 francs, or 19,280,000, an increase of 4,360,000 pounds, and on
September 2, 1850, to 496,000,000 francs, or 19,840,000 pounds, an increase of
about 5,000,000 pounds. This was not accompanied by any depreciation of the
notes; on the contrary , the increased circulation of the notes was accompanied
by the steadily increasing accumulation of gold and silver in the vaults of the
Bank, so that in the summer of 1850 its metallic reserve amounted to about
141,000,000 pounds, an unprecedented sum in France. That the Bank was thus
placed in a position to increase its circulation and therewith its active
capital by 123,000,000 francs, or 5,000,000 pounds, is striking proof of the
correctness of our assertion in an earlier issue that the finance aristocracy
has not only not been overthrown by the revolution, but has even been
strengthened. This result becomes still more evident from the following survey
of French bank legislation during the last few years. On June 10, 1847, the
Bank was authorized to issue notes of 200 francs; hitherto the smallest
denomination had been 500 francs. A decree of March 15, 1848, declared the
notes of the Bank of France legal tender and relieved it of the obligation of
redeeming them in specie. Its note issue was limited to 350,000,000 francs. It
was simultaneously authorized to issue notes of 100 francs. A decree of April
27 prescribed the merging of the departmental banks in the Bank of France;
another decree, of May 2, 1848, increased the latter's note issue to
442,000,000 francs. A decree of December 22, 1849, raised the maximum of the
note issue to 525,000,000 francs. Finally, the law of August 6, 1850,
reestablished the exchangeability of notes for specie. These facts, the
continual increase in the circulation, the concentration of the whole of French
credit in the hands of the Bank, and the accumulation of all French gold and
silver in the Bank's vaults led M. Proudhon to the conclusion that the Bank
must now shed its old snakeskin and metamorphose itself into a Proudhonist
people's bank.[122] He
did not even need to know the history of the English bank restriction from 1797
to 1819;[123] he only
needed to direct his glance across the Channel to see that this fact, for him
unprecedented in the history of bourgeois society, was nothing more than a very
normal bourgeois event, which only now occurred in France for the first time.
One sees that the allegedly revolutionary theoreticians who, after the
Provisional Government, talked big in Paris were just as ignorant of the nature
and the results of the measures taken as the gentlemen of the Provisional
Government themselves.

In spite of the industrial and commercial prosperity that France momentarily
enjoys, the mass of the people, the twenty-five million peasants, suffer from a
great depression. The good harvests of the past few years have forced the
prices of corn much lower even than in England, and the position of the
peasants under such circumstances, in debt, sucked dry by usury and crushed by
taxes, must be anything but splendid. The history of the past three years has,
however, provided sufficient proof that this class of the population is
absolutely incapable of any revolutionary initiative.

Just as the period of crisis began later on the Continent than in England,
so also did prosperity. The process originated in England, which is the
demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. On the Continent the various phases of the
cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and
tertiary form. First, the Continent exports to England disproportionately more
than to any other country. This export to England, however, depends on the
latter's position, especially in regard to the overseas market. England exports
disproportionately more to overseas countries than to the whole Continent, so
that the quantity of continental exports to those countries is always dependent
on England's foreign trade. Hence when crises on the Continent produce
revolutions there first, the bases for them are always laid in England. Violent
outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than
in its heart, because in the latter the possibilities of accommodation are
greater than in the former. On the other hand, the degree to which continental
revolutions affect England is at the same time the thermometer that indicates
to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life
conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations.

Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois
society are developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within
bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a
revolution is possible only in periods when both of these
factors — the modern forces of production and the
bourgeois forms of production — come into opposition
with each other. The various bickerings in which representatives of the
individual factions of the continental party of Order presently engage and
compromise each other, far from providing an occasion for revolution, are, on
the contrary, possible only because the bases of relationships are momentarily
so secure and — what the reactionaries do not know — so
bourgeois. On this all the reactionary attempts to hold back bourgeois
development will rebound just as much as will all the ethical indignation and
all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats. A new revolution is only
a consequence of a new crisis. The one, however, is as sure to come as the
other.

Let us now turn to France.

The victory that the people, in conjunction with the petty bourgeois, had
won in the elections of March 10 was annulled by the people itself when it
provoked the new election of April 28. Vidal was elected not only in Paris, but
also in the Lower Rhine. The Paris Committee, in which the Montagne and the
petty bourgeoisie were strongly represented, induced him to accept for the
Lower Rhine. The victory of March 10 ceased to be a decisive one; the date of
the decision was once more postponed; the tension of the people was relaxed; it
became accustomed to legal triumphs instead of revolutionary ones. The
revolutionary meaning of March 10, the rehabilitation of the June insurrection,
was finally completely annihilated by the candidature of Eugene Sue, the
sentimental petty-bourgeois social-fantast, which the proletariat could at best
accept as a joke to please the grisettes. As against this well-meaning
candidature, the party of Order, emboldened by the vacillating policy of its
opponents, put up a candidate who was to represent the June victory. This comic
candidate was the Spartan paterfamilias Leclerc, from whose person, however,
the heroic armor was torn piece by piece by the press, and who experienced a
brilliant defeat in the election. The new election victory on April 28 put the
Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie in high feather. They already exulted in the
thought of being able to arrive at the goal of their wishes in a purely legal
way and without again pushing the proletariat into the foreground through a new
revolution; they reckoned positively on bringing Ledru-Rollin into the
presidential chair and a majority of Montagnards into the Assembly through
universal suffrage in the new elections of 1852. The party of Order, rendered
perfectly certain by the prospective elections, by Sue's candidature, and by
the mood of the Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie, that the latter were
resolved to remain quiet no matter what happened, answered the two election
victories with an election law which abolished universal suffrage.

The government took good care not to make this legislative proposal on its
own responsibility. It made an apparent concession to the majority by
entrusting the working out of the bill to the high dignitaries of this
majority, the seventeen burgraves.[125] Thus it was not the government that proposed the
repeal of universal suffrage to the Assembly; the majority of the Assembly
proposed it to itself.

On May 8 the project was brought into the Chamber. The entire
Social-Democratic press rose as one man in order to preach to the people
dignified bearing, calme majestueux, passivity, and trust in its
representatives. Every article of these journals was a confession that a
revolution would, above all, annihilate the so-called revolutionary press, and
that therefore it was now a question of its self-preservation. The allegedly
revolutionary press betrayed its whole secret. It signed its own death
warrant.

On May 21 the Montagne put the preliminary question to debate and moved the
rejection of the whole project on the ground that it violated the constitution.
The party of Order answered that the constitution would be violated if it were
necessary; there was, however, no need for this at present, because the
constitution was capable of every interpretation, and because the majority
alone was competent to decide on the correct interpretation. To the unbridled,
savage attacks of Thiers and Montalembert the Montagne opposed a decorous and
refined humanism. It took its stand on the ground of law; the party of Order
referred it to the ground on which the law grows, to bourgeois property. The
Montagne whimpered: Did they really want, then, to conjure up revolutions by
main force? The party of Order replied: One would await them.

On May 22 the preliminary question was settled by 462 votes to 227. The same
men who had proved with such solemn profundity that the National Assembly and
every individual deputy would be renouncing his mandate if he renounced the
people, his mandatory, now stuck to their seats and suddenly sought to let the
country act, through petitions at that, instead of acting themselves, and still
sat there unmoved when, on May 31, the law went through in splendid fashion.
They sought to revenge themselves by a protest in which they recorded their
innocence of the rape of the constitution, a protest which they did not even
submit openly, but smuggled into the President's pocket from the rear.

An army of 150,000 men in Paris, the long deferment of the decision, the
appeasing attitude of the press, the pusillanimity of the Montagne and of the
newly elected representatives, the majestic calm of the petty bourgeois, but
above all, the commercial and industrial prosperity, prevented any attempt at
revolution on the part of the proletariat.

Universal suffrage had fulfilled its mission. The majority of the people had
passed through the school of development, which is all that universal suffrage
can serve for in a revolutionary period. It had to be set aside by a revolution
or by the reaction.

The Montagne developed a still greater display of energy on an occasion that
arose soon afterward. From the tribune War Minister Hautpoul had termed the
February Revolution a baneful catastrophe. The orators of the Montagne, who, as
always, distinguished themselves by their morally indignant bluster, were not
allowed by the President, Dupin, to speak. Girardin proposed to the Montagne
that it should walk out at once en masse. Result: The Montagne remained seated,
but Girardin was cast out from its midst as unworthy.

The election law still needed one thing to complete it, a new press
law. This was not long in coming. A proposal of the government, made many
times more drastic by amendments of the party of Order, increased the caution
money, put an extra stamp on feuilleton fiction (answer to the election of
Eugène Sue), taxed all publications appearing weekly or monthly up to a certain
number of sheets, and finally provided that every article of a journal must
bear the signature of the author. The provisions concerning the caution money
killed the so-called revolutionary press; the people regarded its extinction as
satisfaction for the abolition of universal suffrage. However, neither the
tendency nor the effect of the new law extended only to this section of the
press. As long as the newspaper press was anonymous, it appeared as the organ
of a numberless and nameless public opinion; it was the third power in the
state. Through the signature of every article, a newspaper became a mere
collection of literary contributions from more or less known individuals. Every
article sank to the level of an advertisement. Hitherto the newspapers had
circulated as the paper money of public opinion; now they were resolved into
more or less bad solo bills, whose worth and circulation depended on the credit
not only of the drawer but also of the endorser. The press of the party of
Order had incited not only for the repeal of universal suffrage but also for
the most extreme measures against the bad press. However, in its sinister
anonymity even the good press was irksome to the party of Order and still more
to its individual provincial representatives. As for itself, it demanded only
the paid writer, with name, address, and description. In vain the good press
bemoaned the ingratitude with which its services were rewarded. The law went
through; the provision about the giving of names hit it hardest of all. The
names of republican journalists were rather well known; but the respectable
firms of the "Journal des Débats", the “Assemblée Nationale", the
"Constitutionnel", etc., etc., cut a sorry figure in their high protestations
of state wisdom when the mysterious company all at once disintegrated into
purchasable penny-a-liners of long practice, who had defended all possible
causes for cash, like Granier de Cassagnac, or into old milksops who called
themselves statesmen, like Capefigue, or into coquettish fops, like M. Lemoinne
of the Débats.

In the debate on the press law the Montagne had already sunk to such a level
of moral degeneracy that it had to confine itself to applauding the brilliant
tirades of an old notable of Louis Philippe's time, M. Victor Hugo.

With the election law and the press law the revolutionary and democratic
party exits from the official stage. Before their departure home, shortly after
the end of the session, the two factions of the Montagne, the socialist
democrats and the democratic socialists, issued two manifestoes, two testimonia
paupertatis [certificates of pauperism] in which
they proved that while power and success were never on their side, they
nonetheless had ever been on the side of eternal justice and all the other
eternal truths.

Let us now consider the party of Order. The “Neue Rheinische
Zeitung” had said: “As against the hankering for restoration on the
part of the united Orléanists and Legitimists, Bonaparte defends his title to
his actual power, the republic; as against the hankering for restoration on the
part of Bonaparte, the party of Order defends its title to its common rule, the
republic; as against the Orléanists, the Legitimists, and as against the
Legitimists, the Orléanists, defend the status quo, the republic. All these
factions of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its own
restoration in petto, mutually enforce, as against their rivals’
hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the
form in which the special claims remain neutralized and reserved — the
republic.... And Thiers spoke more truly than he suspects when he said:
‘We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the constitutional
republic’.”

This comedy of the républicains malgré eux [republicans in spite of themselves], the antipathy to
the status quo and the constant consolidation of it; the incessant friction
between Bonaparte and the National Assembly; the ever renewed threat of the
party of Order to split into its separate component parts, and the ever
repeated conjugation of its factions; the attempt of each faction to transform
each victory over the common foe into a defeat for its temporary allies; the
mutual petty jealousy, chicanery, harassment, the tireless drawing of swords
that ever and again ends with a baiser Lamourette[15] — this whole unedifying comedy of errors
never developed more classically than during the past six months.

The party of Order regarded the election law at the same time as a victory
over Bonaparte. Had not the government abdicated when it handed over the
editing of and responsibility for its own proposal to the Commission of
Seventeen? And did not the chief strength of Bonaparte as against the Assembly
lie in the fact that he was the chosen of six millions? Bonaparte, on his part,
treated the election law as a concession to the Assembly, with which he claimed
to have purchased harmony between the legislative and executive powers. As
reward, the vulgar adventurer demanded an increase of three millions in his
civil list. Dared the National Assembly enter into a conflict with the
executive at a moment when it had excommunicated the great majority of
Frenchmen? It was roused to anger; it appeared to want to go to extremes; its
commission rejected the motion; the Bonapartist press threatened, and referred
to the disinherited people, deprived of its franchise; numerous noisy attempts
at an arrangement took place, and the Assembly finally gave way in fact, but at
the same time revenged itself in principle. Instead of increasing the civil
list in principle by three millions per annum, it granted Bonaparte an
accommodation of 2,160,000 francs. Not satisfied with this, it made even this
concession only after it had been supported by Changarnier, the general of the
party of Order and the protector thrust upon Bonaparte. Therefore it really
granted the two millions not to Bonaparte, but to Changarnier.

This sop, thrown to him de mauvaise grâce [with
bad grace], was accepted by Bonaparte quite in the spirit of the donor.
The Bonapartist press blustered anew against the National Assembly. When in the
debate on the press law the amendment was made on the signing of names —
which, in turn, was directed especially against the less important papers
— the representatives of the private interests of Bonaparte, the
principal Bonapartist paper, the Pouvoir, published an open and
vehement attack on the National Assembly. The ministers had to disavow the
paper before the Assembly; the girant [manager] of the Pouvoir was summoned before
the bar of the National Assembly and sentenced to pay the highest fine, 5,000
francs. Next day the Pouvoir published a still more insolent article
against the Assembly, and as the revenge of the government, the public
prosecutor promptly prosecuted a number of Legitimist journals for violating
the constitution.

Finally there came the question of proroguing the Assembly. Bonaparte
desired this in order to be able to operate unhindered by the Assembly. The
party of Order desired it partly for the purpose of carrying on its factional
intrigues, partly for the pursuit of the private interests of the individual
deputies. Both needed it in order to consolidate and push further the victories
of reaction in the provinces. The Assembly therefore adjourned from August 11
until November 11. Since, however, Bonaparte in no way concealed that his only
concern was to get rid of the irksome surveillance of the National Assembly,
the Assembly imprinted on the vote of confidence itself the stamp of lack of
confidence in the President. All Bonapartists were kept off the permanent
commission of twenty-eight members who stayed on during the recess as guardians
of the virtue of the republic.[129] In their stead, even some republicans of the
Siècle and the National were elected to it, in order to prove
to the President the attachment of the majority to the constitutional
republic.

Shortly before, and especially immediately after the recess, the two big
factions of the party of Order, the Orléanists and the Legitimists, appeared to
want to be reconciled, and this by a fusion of the two royal houses under whose
flags they were fighting. The papers were full of reconciliation proposals that
were said to have been discussed at the sickbed of Louis Philippe at St.
Leonards, when the death of Louis Philippe suddenly simplified the situation.
Louis Philippe was the usurper, Henry V the dispossessed; the Count of Paris,
on the other hand, owing to the childlessness of Henry V, was his lawful heir
to the throne. Every pretext for objecting to a fusion of the two dynastic
interests was now removed. But precisely now the two factions of the
bourgeoisie first discovered that it was not zeal for a definite royal house
that divided them, but that it was rather their divided class interests that
kept the two dynasties apart. The Legitimists, who had made a pilgrimage to the
residence of Henry V at Wiesbaden just as their competitors had to St.
Leonards, received there the news of Louis Philippe's death. Forthwith they
formed a ministry in partibus infidelium[16], which consisted mostly of members of that
commission of guardians of the virtue of the republic and which on the occasion
of a squabble in the bosom of the party came out with the most outspoken
proclamation of right by the grace of God. The Orléanists rejoiced over the
compromising scandal that this manifesto[130] called forth in the press, and did not conceal
for a moment their open enmity to the Legitimists.

During the adjournment of the National Assembly, the Councils of the
departments met. The majority of them declared for a more or less qualified
revision of the constitution; that is, they declared for a not definitely
specified monarchist restoration, for a "solution", and confessed at
the same time that they were too incompetent and too cowardly to find this
solution. The Bonapartist faction at once construed this desire for revision in
the sense of a prolongation of Bonaparte's presidency.

The constitutional solution, the retirement of Bonaparte in May, 1852,[131] the simultaneous
election of a new President by all the electors of the land, the revision of
the constitution by a Chamber of Revision during the first months of the new
presidency, is utterly inadmissible for the ruling class. The day of the new
presidential election would be the day of rendezvous for all the hostile
parties, the Legitimists, the Orléanists, the bourgeois republicans, the
revolutionists. It would have to come to a violent decision between the
different factions. Even if the party of Order should succeed in uniting around
the candidature of a neutral person outside the dynastic families, he would
still be opposed by Bonaparte. In its struggle with the people, the party of
Order is compelled constantly to increase the power of the executive. Every
increase of the executive's power increases the power of its bearer, Bonaparte.
In the same measure, therefore, as the party of Order strengthens its joint
might, it strengthens the fighting resources of Bonaparte's dynastic
pretensions, it strengthens his chance of frustrating a constitutional solution
by force on the day of the decision. He will then have, as against the party of
Order, no more scruples about the one pillar of the constitution than that
party had, as against the people, about the other pillar in the matter of the
election law. He would, seemingly even against the Assembly, appeal to
universal suffrage. In a word, the constitutional solution questions the entire
political status quo and behind the jeopardizing of the status quo the
bourgeois sees chaos, anarchy, civil war. He sees his purchases and sales, his
promissory notes, his marriages, his agreements duly acknowledged before a
notary, his mortgages, his ground rents, house rents, profits, all his
contracts and sources of income called in question on the first Sunday in May,
1852, and he cannot expose himself to this risk. Behind the jeopardizing of the
political status quo lurks the danger of the collapse of the entire bourgeois
society. The only possible solution in the framework of the bourgeoisie is the
postponement of the solution. It can save the constitutional republic only by a
violation of the constitution, by the prolongation of the power of the
President. This is also the last word of the press of Order, after the
protracted and profound debates on the “solutions” in which it
indulged after the session of the general councils. The high and mighty party
of Order thus finds itself, to its shame, compelled to take seriously the
ridiculous, commonplace, and, to it, odious person of the pseudo Bonaparte.

This dirty figure likewise deceived himself about the causes that clothed
him more and more with the character of the indispensable man. While his party
had sufficient insight to ascribe the growing importance of Bonaparte to
circumstances, he believed that he owed it solely to the magic power of his
name and his continual caricaturing of Napoleon. He became more enterprising
every day. To offset the pilgrimages to St. Leonards and Wiesbaden, he made his
round trips through France. The Bonapartists had so little faith in the magic
effect of his personality that they sent with him everywhere as claquers people
from the Society of December 10,[132] that organization of the Paris lumpen
proletariat, packed en masse into railway trains and post chaises. They put
speeches into the mouth of their marionette which, according to the reception
in the different towns, proclaimed republican resignation or perennial tenacity
as the keynote of the President's policy. In spite of all maneuvers these
journeys were anything but triumphal processions.

When Bonaparte believed he had thus made the people enthusiastic, he set out
to win the army. He caused great reviews to be held on the plain of Satory,
near Versailles, at which he sought to buy the soldiers with garlic sausages,
champagne, and cigars. Whereas the genuine Napoleon, amid the hardships of his
campaigns of conquest, knew how to cheer up his weary soldiers with outbursts
of patriarchal familiarity, the pseudo Napoleon believed it was in gratitude
that the troops shouted: Vive Napoleon, vive le saucisson! [Long live Napoleon, long live the sausage!] that is,
Hurrah for the Wurst [sausage], hurrah for
the Hanswurst [buffoon]!

These reviews led to the outbreak of the long suppressed dissension between
Bonaparte and his War Minister Hautpoul, on the one hand, and Changarnier, on
the other. In Changarnier the party of Order had found its real neutral man, in
whose case there could be no question of his own dynastic claims. It had
designated him Bonaparte's successor. In addition, Changarnier had become the
great general of the party of Order through his conduct on January 29 and June
13, 1849, the modern Alexander whose brutal intervention had, in the eyes of
the timid bourgeois, cut the Gordian knot of the revolution. At bottom just as
ridiculous as Bonaparte, he had thus become a power in the very cheapest manner
and was set up by the National Assembly to watch the President. He himself
coquetted, for example, in the matter of the salary grant, with the protection
that he gave Bonaparte, and rose up ever more overpoweringly against him and
the ministers. When, on the occasion of the election law, an insurrection was
expected, he forbade his officers to take any orders whatever from the War
Minister or the President. The press was also instrumental in magnifying the
figure of Changarnier. With the complete absence of great personalities, the
party of Order naturally found itself compelled to endow a single individual
with the strength lacking in its class as a whole and so puff up this
individual to a prodigy. Thus arose the myth of Changarnier, the
“bulwark of society.” The arrogant charlatanry, the
secretive air of importance with which Changarnier condescended to carry the
world on his shoulders, forms the most ridiculous contrast to the events during
and after the [last] Satory review, which irrefutably proved that it needed
only a stroke of the pen by Bonaparte, the infinitely little, to bring this
fantastic offspring of bourgeois fear, the colossus Changarnier, back to the
dimensions of mediocrity and transform him, society's heroic savior, into a
pensioned general.

Bonaparte had for some time been revenging himself on Changarnier by
provoking the War Minister to disputes in matters of discipline with the
irksome protector. The last review at Satory finally brought the old animosity
to a climax. The constitutional indignation of Changarnier knew no bounds when
he saw the cavalry regiments file past with the unconstitutional cry: Vive
l'Empereur! [Long live the Emperor!] In order
to forestall any unpleasant debate on this cry in the coming session of the
Chamber, Bonaparte removed War Minister Hautpoul by appointing him governor of
Algiers. In his place he put a reliable old general of the time of the Empire,
one who was fully a match for Changarnier in brutality. But so that the
dismissal of Hautpoul might not appear as a concession to Changarnier, he
simultaneously transferred General Neumayer, the right hand of the great savior
of society, from Paris to Nantes. It was Neumayer who at the last review had
induced the whole of the infantry to file past the successor of Napoleon in icy
silence. Changarnier, himself attacked in the person of Neumayer, protested and
threatened. To no purpose. After two days' negotiations, the decree
transferring Neumayer appeared in the Moniteur, and there was nothing
left for the hero of Order but to submit to discipline or resign.

Bonaparte's struggle with Changarnier is the continuation of his struggle
with the party of Order. The reopening of the National Assembly on November 11
will therefore take place under threatening auspices. It will be a storm in a
teacup. In essence the old game must go on. Meanwhile the majority of the party
of Order will, despite the clamor of the sticklers for principle in its
different factions, be compelled to prolong the power of the President.
Similarly, Bonaparte, already humbled by lack of money, will, despite all
preliminary protestations, accept this prolongation of power from the hands of
the National Assembly as simply delegated to him. Thus the solution is
postponed; the status quo continued; one faction of the party of Order
compromised, weakened, made unworkable by the other; the repression of the
common enemy, the mass of the nation, extended and exhausted — until the
economic relations themselves have again reached the point of development where
a new explosion blows into the air all these squabbling parties with their
constitutional republic.

For the peace of mind of the bourgeois it must be said, however, that the
scandal between Bonaparte and the party of Order has the result of ruining a
multitude of small capitalists on the Bourse and putting their assets into the
pockets of the big wolves of the Bourse.

Notes

14. The
continuation of the three foregoing chapters is found in the Revue in the fifth
and sixth double issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the last to appear.
Here, after the great commercial crisis that broke out in England in 1847 had
first been described and the coming to a head of the political complications on
the European continent in the revolutions of February and March, 1848, had been
explained by its reactions there, it is then shown how the prosperity of trade
and industry that again set in during the course of 1848 and increased still
further in 1849 paralyzed the revolutionary upsurge and made possible the
simultaneous victories of the reaction. With special reference to France, it is
then said: — Written by Engels for the 1895 edition, as an
introductory paragraph to Section IV.

15.
Lamourette's kiss. On July 7, 1792, Bishop Adrien Lamourette, a deputy in the
Legislative Assembly, proposed that party dissensions be ended with a fraternal
kiss. The deputies enthusiastically embraced each other then, but the fraternal
embrace was soon forgotten. French wits came to use the expression to denote a
trivial love affair.

16. In the
realms of the unbelievers; referring to the non-Christian dioceses to which
Catholic bishops were assigned by the Early Church.

Class Struggles in France 1848-1850

Notes

64. The
Paris uprising of June 5 and 6, 1832, was prepared by the Left
republicans and by secret revolutionary societies including the Society of the
Friends of the People. The uprising flared up during the funeral of General
Lamarque, an opponent of Louis Philippe’s Government. The insurgent
workers threw up barricades and defended them with great courage; the red flag
was hoisted over them for the first time.

The uprising of Lyons workers in April 1834,
directed by the secret republican Society of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen, was one of the first mass actions by the French proletariat. The
uprising, supported by republicans in several other towns including Paris, was
brutally suppressed.

The Paris uprising of May 12, 1839, in which
the revolutionary workers played a leading part, was prepared by the secret
republican socialist Society of the Seasons led by Auguste Blanqui and Armand
Barbès; it was suppressed by troops and the National Guard,

65.
Robert Macaire – a character portraying a clever swindler,
created by the famous French actor Frederick Lemaître and immortalised in the
caricatures of Honoré Daumier. The figure of Robert Macaire was a biting satire
on the domination of the financial aristocracy under the July monarchy.

66. The
reference is to the repercussions of the suppression of the uprising in the
free city of Cracow (the Cracow Republic) which, by decision of the Congress of
Vienna, came under the joint control of Austria, Prussia and Russia, who had
partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. The insurgents
succeeded in seizing power in Cracow on February 22, 1846, established a
National Government of the Polish Republic and issued a manifesto abolishing
feudal services. The Cracow uprising was suppressed at the beginning of March;
in November 1846, Austria, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty incorporating
Cracow into the Austrian Empire.

67. In the
spring of 1847 at Buzaruçais (department of the Indre) the starving workers and
the inhabitants of neighbouring villages looted storehouses belonging to
profiteers, which led to a clash between the population and troops. Four of
those who took part were executed and many others sentenced to hard labour.

68. The
dynastic opposition – an opposition group in the French Chamber
of Deputies during the July monarchy (1830-48). The group, headed by Odilon
Barrot, expressed the sentiments of the liberal industrial and commercial
bourgeoisie and favoured a moderate electoral reform, which they regarded as a
means to prevent revolution and preserve the Orleans dynasty.

70. During
the first days of the revolution, the workers of Paris demanded that the French
Republic’s flag should be red, the colour of that hoisted in the
workers’ suburbs of Paris during the June uprising of 1832. Bourgeois
representatives insisted on the tricolour (blue-white-and-red) which had been
the national standard during the French Revolution and under Napoleon I. It had
been the emblem of the bourgeois republicans grouped around the newspaper
National even before 1848. In the end, the tricolour was accepted as
the national standard with a red rosette fixed to the flagstaff; later, the
rosette was removed.

71. In 1848
Le Moniteur universel printed reports on the sittings of the
Luxembourg Commission alongside official documents.

72. The
reference is to the sum assigned by the King in 1825 as compensation for
aristocrats whose property had been confiscated during the French Revolution,

73. The
Mobile Guards, set up by a decree of the Provisional Government on
February 25, 1848, with the secret aim of fighting the revolutionary masses,
were used to crush the June uprising of the Paris workers. Later they were
disbanded on the insistence of Bonapartist circles, who feared that if a
conflict arose between Louis Bonaparte and the republicans, the Mobile Guards
would side with the latter.

74.
Lazzaroni – a contemptuous nickname for declassed proletarians,
primarily in the Kingdom of Naples, who were repeatedly used in the struggle
against the liberal and democratic movement.

75. The Poor
Law adopted in England in 1834 provided for only one form of relief for the
able-bodied poor: workhouses with a prison-like regime in which the workers
were engaged in unproductive, monotonous and exhausting labour. The people
called these workhouses “Bastilles for the poor.” Here and later
Marx uses the English word “workhouses.”

76. The
reference is to the elections to the National Guard and the Constituent
Assembly which were to be held on March 18 and April 9, 1848, respectively.
Paris workers, grouped around Blanqui, Dézamy and others, insisted on a
postponement of the elections arguing that they should be prepared by thorough
explanatory work among the population. As a result of the popular demonstration
on March 17 in Paris, regular troops were withdrawn from the capital (after the
events of April 16 they were brought back), and elections to the National Guard
were postponed till April 5 and to the Constituent Assembly till April 23.

78.
Commission du pouvoir executif (the Executive Commission) – the
Government of the French Republic set up by the Constituent Assembly on May 10,
1848, to replace the Provisional Government which had resigned. It existed
until June 24, 1848, when Cavaignac’s dictatorship was established during
the June proletarian uprising. Moderate republicans predominated on the
Commission; Ledru-Rollin was the sole representative of the Left.

80. Under
the decree prohibiting congregations of people adopted by the Constituent
Assembly on June 7, 1848, the organisation of gatherings and meetings in the
open was punishable by imprisonment of up to ten years.

81. On June
22, 1848, Le Moniteur universel No. 174 in the section
‘’Partie non officielle” reported an order of the Executive
Commission of June 21 on the expulsion of workers between the ages of 17 and 25
from the national workshops and their compulsory enrolment in the army. On July
3, 1848, after the suppression of the June insurrection of the Paris workers,
the government passed a decree dissolving the national workshops.

83. In the
German original, the term Haupt- und Staatsaktion (“principal
and spectacular action,” “main and state action”) is used,
which has a double meaning. First, in the seventeenth and the first half of the
eighteenth century, it denoted plays performed by German touring companies. The
plays were rather formless historical tragedies, bombastic and at the same time
coarse and farcical.

Second, this term can denote major political events. It
was used in this sense by a trend in German historical science known as
“objective historiography.”

Leopold Ranke was one of its chief representatives. He
regarded Haupt- und Staatsaktion as the main subject-matter.

84. The
reference is to the by-elections to the Constituent Assembly in Paris on
September 17, 1848 (to replace former deputies, including those who were
deprived of their powers after the June insurrection was suppressed). Among the
newly elected was the revolutionary socialist Francois Raspail, imprisoned
after the events of May 15, 1848.

85. This
refers to a system of general treaties set up by the Congress of Vienna
(September 1814-June 1815), embracing the whole of Europe, apart from Turkey.
The Congress decisions helped to restore feudal order, perpetuated the
political fragmentation of Germany and Italy, sanctioned the incorporation of
Belgium into Holland and the partition of Poland, and outlined measures to
combat the revolutionary movement.

86. The
Projet de constitution présenté à l’Assemblée nationale drafted
by the commission was submitted to the National Assembly by Marrast on June 19,
1848. The draft was published in Le Moniteur universel No. 172, June
20, 1848. A German translation of the draft was published in the supplement to
No. 24 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on June 24, 1848. After the June
insurrection, this draft was thoroughly revised by its authors in a
conservative spirit. The Constitution of the French Republic was finally
adopted on November 4, 1848.

87. The lily
– a heraldic emblem of the Bourbon dynasty; the violet – a
Bonapartist emblem.

88. By a
decree of the Senate (Senatus consult) of May 18, 1804, Napoleon I, the founder
of the Bonaparte dynasty, was proclaimed Emperor of the French.

During the February uprising of 1848, King Louis
Philippe and the monarchist circles were compelled to make Guizot and other
unpopular ministers tender their resignations, and tried to form a government
of moderate liberals to save the monarchy. On the morning of February 24 Odilon
Barrot was authorised to head the Cabinet, but Louis Philippe was compelled to
abdicate and flee by the victory of the popular revolution. The Barrot Ministry
survived till that afternoon.

89. On
January 26, 1849, the Minister of Public Works Leon Faucher submitted and
demanded urgent discussion of a Bill on the right of association, prohibiting
clubs. The Constituent Assembly, however, refused to discuss the Bill as an
urgent matter. In spite of opposition from the Left deputies, who demanded the
Ministry’s resignation, accusing it of a breach of the Constitution, the
first clause of the Bill (better known as the Bill on Clubs) was adopted by the
National Assembly by a monarchist and moderate republican vote on March 21,
1849. This decision dealt a serious blow at the freedom of assembly and
association, primarily at the workers’ associations.

90. An
allusion to the similarity between the schemes for restoring the monarchy in
December 1848, when Changarnier assumed command of the National Guard and the
Paris garrison, and the part General Monk played in restoring the Stuarts in
1660.

91. In April
1849, President Louis Bonaparte and the French Government sent an expeditionary
corps to Italy under General Oudinot to intervene against the Roman Republic
proclaimed on February 9, 1849, and to restore the secular power of the Pope.
On April 30, 1849, the French troops were driven back from Rome. The main blow
was dealt by Garibaldi’s volunteer corps. Oudinot violated the terms of
the armistice signed by the French, however, and on June 3 started a new
offensive against the Roman Republic, which had just completed a military
campaign against Neapolitan troops in the south and was engaged in rebuffing
the Austrians in the north. After a month of heroic defence, Rome was captured
by the interventionists and the Roman Republic ceased to exist.

92. The
reference is to the defeat of the Piedmontese army during the second stage of
the Austro-Italian war which broke out on March 25, 1848, as a result of the
national liberation uprising in Lombardy and Venice against Austrian rule.
However, the Piedmontese were compelled by military setbacks, particularly the
defeat at Custozza on July 25 and 26, 1848, and the capture of Milan by the
Austrians, to conclude an onerous armistice with Austria on August 9, 1848. On
March 12, 1849, under public pressure, Charles Albert, King of Sardinia,
cancelled the armistice and on March 20 hostilities were resumed. Despite
national enthusiasm in Austrian-occupied Lombardy and throughout Italy, the
Piedmontese army was defeated at Novara on March 23. Charles Albert abdicated.
Victor Emmanuel II, the new King, concluded an armistice with the Austrians on
March 26, and on August 6 a peace treaty was signed restoring Austrian rule in
Northern Italy and the Austrian protectorate over a number of states of Central
Italy (Parma, Tuscany, etc.).

Engels gives a detailed account of the Austro-Italian
war of 1848-49 in his articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

93. Le
Comité de saint public (the Committee of Public Safety) established by the
Convention on April 6, 1793; during the Jacobin dictatorship (June 2, 1793-July
27, 1794) it was the leading body of the revolutionary government in France. It
lasted until October 26, 1795.

95. General
Brea, who commanded some of the troops that suppressed the June insurrection of
the Paris proletariat, was killed by the insurgents at the gates of
Fontainebleau on June 25, 1848, for which two of the insurgents were executed.

96. The
reference is to the revolutionary events in Hungary and Germany in the spring
and summer of 1849. A counter-offensive by the Hungarian revolutionary army,
which routed the Austrian troops and almost cleared the Austrian invaders from
the whole country, began in April. Hungary declared its independence on April
14, the Habsburg dynasty was officially dethroned and Kossuth elected head of
state. However, a change unfavourable to the revolutionary movement shortly
took place in the Hungarian campaign. In mid-June 1849 the Tsarist army entered
Hungary to assist the Austrian counter-revolution. The Tsarist intervention was
in effect approved by the ruling circles of France and England. The combined
forces of the Habsburgs and the Tsar suppressed the Hungarian revolution.

Almost simultaneously with the counter-offensive by the
Hungarians, popular uprisings broke out in Saxony, Rhenish Prussia, the
Palatinate and Baden in defence of the Imperial Constitution drafted by the
Frankfurt National Assembly but rejected by the King of Prussia and other
German princes. On the development of these uprisings see Engels’ essays
The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution.

97. The
reference is to the bombardment of Rome by Oudinot’s expeditionary corps
on June 3, 1849. Rome was repeatedly subjected to fierce bombardments during
the French siege, which lasted until July 3, 1849.

98. Article
V belongs to the introductory part of the Constitution. The articles of the
principal part of the Constitution are numbered in Arabic figures.

99. The
meeting of the Montagne leaders was held on the premises of the
Fourierists’ daily La Démocratie pacifique on the evening of
June 12, 1849. (Using the expression friedfertige [pacific]
Demokratie, Marx plays on the title of the newspaper and its trend.)
The participants refused to resort to arms and decided to confine themselves to
a peaceful demonstration.

100. In the
manifesto published in Le Peuple No. 206, June 13, 1849, the
Democratic Association of the Friends of the Constitution – an
organisation of moderate bourgeois republicans formed by the National
party members during the Legislative Assembly election campaign –
called upon the citizens of Paris to participate in a peaceful demonstration to
protest against the “presumptuous pretensions” of the executive
authorities.

101. The
Declaration of the Montagne was published in La Réforme and
in La Démocratie pacifique and also in Proudhon’s newspaper
Le Peuple No. 206,June 13, 1849.

102. The
events in Paris sparked off an armed uprising of Lyons workers and craftsmen on
June 15, 1849. The insurgents occupied the Croix-Rousse quarter and erected
barricades, but were suppressed by troops after several hours of staunch
struggle.

103. On
August 10, 1849, the Legislative Assembly adopted a law under which
“instigators and supporters of the conspiracy and the attempt of June
13” were liable to trial by the Supreme Court. Thirty-four deputies of
the Mountain (Ledru-Rollin, Felix Pyat and Victor Considerant among them) were
deprived of their mandates and put on trial (some of them, those who emigrated,
were tried by default). On June 13, the editorial offices of democratic and
socialist newspapers were raided and the main of these papers were banned.
Repressions were extended to emigrants residing in France, including Marx, who
was ordered to leave Paris for the department of Morbihan, a remote swampy area
in Brittany (on this see present edition, Vol. 9, p. 527). At the end of August
1849 Marx left France for England, not wishing to submit to the arbitrary
police decision.

104. The
reference is to the Municipal Guard of Paris formed after the July
1830 revolution and subordinated to the Prefect of Police. It was used to
suppress popular uprisings and was disbanded after the February 1848
revolution.

105. In the
battle of Waterloo(June 18, 1815) Napoleon’s army was defeated
by British and Prussian troops commanded by Wellington and Blücher.

106. The
reference is to the commission of three cardinals (who traditionally wore
scarlet mantles) which, after the suppression of the Roman Republic by the
French army and relying on support from the interventionists, restored the
reactionary clerical regime in the papal states.

108.
Alongside Wiesbaden, Ems was a permanent residence of Count Chambord, the
Legitimist pretender to the French throne (who called himself Henry V).

109. Louis
Philippe, who had fled from France after the February revolution of 1848, lived
in Claremont.

110.
“Motu proprio” (of his own motion) – initial words
of a special kind of papal encyclical adopted without the preliminary approval
of the cardinals and usually concerning the internal political and
administrative affairs of the papal states.

Here this refers to the statement of Pope Pius IX
“To My Beloved Subjects” of September 12, 1849 (the French text was
published in Le Moniteur universel No. 271, September 28, 1849).

111. The
proposition that the proletarian revolution could only be victorious in several
advanced capitalist countries simultaneously and not in a single country alone
was most clearly formulated by Engels in his work Principles of Communism
(1847) (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 351-52). By developing further
the Marxist theory and drawing on the law of uneven economic and political
development of capitalism in the era of imperialism, in 1915 Lenin came to the
conclusion that under the new historical conditions, the victory of the
socialist revolution would be possible initially in a few or even in a single
country.

112. The
figures do not tally: the text reads 538,000,000 instead of 578,178,000,
apparently a misprint. This does not, however, affect the general conclusion,
for the net per capita income is less than 25 francs in both cases.

113.
Lagarde, a supporter of the Mountain party, was elected to the Legislative
Assembly in the by-elections held in the department of the Gironde on October
14, 1849, to replace the deceased Right-wing deputy Ravez.

116. in his
message of November 10, 1849, Carlier, the newly appointed Paris Police
Prefect, called for a “social anti-socialist league” to be set up
for the protection of “religion, labour, family, property and
loyalty.” The message was published in Le Moniteur universel No.
315, November 11, 1849.

118. The
July column erected in Paris on Bastille Square in 1840 in memory of
those who fell in the July revolution of 1830 has been decorated with wreaths
of immortelles ever since the February revolution of 1848.

119. May 4,
1848 – the Constituent Assembly was convened; December 20, 1848 –
Louis Bonaparte became President; May 13, 1849 – elections were held to
the Legislative Assembly; July 8, 1849 – by-elections took place in Paris
as a result of which the party of Order strengthened its position in the
Legislative Assembly.

120.
Coblenz – a city in Western Germany; it was the centre of
counter-revolutionary emigration during the French Revolution.

121. The
reference is to the discovery of gold in California in 1848. Along with the
discovery of rich deposits of gold in Australia in 1851, the Californian
discovery added to the industrial and stock-exchange agitation in capitalist
countries.

122.
Proudhon expressed this point of view in his polemics against the bourgeois
economist Frederic Bastiat, published in La Voix du peuple from
November 1849 to February 1850 and reproduced in a separate edition which
appeared in Paris in 1850 under the title Gratuite du credit. Discussion
entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon.

123. In
1797 the British Government issued a special Bank Restriction Act making
bank-notes legal tender and suspending the payment of gold for them.

Convertibility was reintroduced only in 1821 in
conformity with a law passed in 1819.

125. The
reference is to the commission of 17 Orleanists and Legitimists - deputies to
the Legislative Assembly – appointed by the Minister of the Interior on
May 1, 1850, to draft a new electoral law. Its members were nicknamed
burgraves, a name borrowed from the title of Victor Hugo’s historical
drama as an allusion to their unwarranted claims to power and their reactionary
aspirations. The drama is set in medieval Germany where the Burggraf
was governor of a Burg (city) or a district, appointed by the
Emperor.

127.
Baiser-Lamourette (Lamourette’s kiss) – an allusion to an
incident during the French Revolution. On July 7, 1792, Lamourette, deputy to
the Legislative Assembly, proposed to end all party dissension with a fraternal
kiss, and the representatives of the hostile parties, in accordance with this
proposal, embraced one another. The following day, however, the struggle among
the parties flared up with fresh vigour.

129. The
reference is to a new ministry to be appointed if the Bourbon dynasty was
restored in the person of the Legitimist pretender to the throne, Count
Chambord. It was to consist of de Levis, de Saint-Priest, Berryer, de Pastoret
and d’Escars.

130. The
reference is to the so-called Wiesbaden Manifesto – a circular drawn up
in Wiesbaden on August 30, 1850, by de Barthélemy, secretary of the Legitimist
faction in the Legislative Assembly, on the instruction of Count Chambord (de
Barthélemy, La conspiration légitimiste avouée, in Le Peuple de
1850 No. 24, September 22, 1850). The circular was the
Legitimists’ policy statement in case they came to power. Count Chambord
declared that he “officially and categorically rejects any appeal to the
people, because it will signify a negation of the great national principle of
hereditary monarchy.” This statement evoked protests among the
Legitimists themselves, notably from a group headed by La Rochejaquelein, and
polemics in the press.

131. An
allusion to the expiration of Louis Bonaparte’s presidential powers. In
the text the date is not exact. According to the Constitution of the French
Republic, presidential elections were to be held every four years on the second
Sunday in May, on which day the powers of the incumbent President expired.

132. The
Society of December 10 (Dix Decembre) – a Bonapartist
organisation founded in 1849 and consisting mainly of declassed elements,
political adventurists, the reactionary military. Many of its members helped to
elect Louis Bonaparte as President of the Republic on December 10, 1848,
hence its name. This organisation played an active part in the Bonapartist
coup d’état on December 2, 1851. Marx describes the society in his
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.